Nutritional supplementation boosts aerobic exercise effects on functional brain systems.

There is growing evidence that aerobic exercise protects against age-related cognitive decline and that cardiorespiratory fitness is an important factor for these benefits. Studies also suggest that combining physical activity with cognitive enrichment is beneficial. We further examine these predictions by comparing effects of a nutritional supplement promoting exercise capacity to a lower-intensity activity with cognitive enrichment on functional network and cognitive outcomes that otherwise decline with aging.

Examining neural correlates of psychopathology using a lesion-based approach.

Studies of individuals with focal brain damage have long been used to expand understanding of the neural basis of psychopathology. However, most previous studies were conducted using small sample sizes and relatively coarse methods for measuring psychopathology or mapping brain-behavior relationships. Here, we examined the factor structure and neural correlates of psychopathology in 232 individuals with focal brain damage, using their responses to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF).

Neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience in the fMRI era: A recapitulation of localizationist and connectionist views.

Objective: We highlight the past 25 years of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, focusing on the impact to the field of the introduction in 1992 of functional MRI (fMRI).

Method: We reviewed the past 25 years of literature in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, focusing on the relation and interplay of fMRI studies and studies utilizing the "lesion method" in human participants with focal brain damage.

Results: Our review highlights the state of localist/connectionist research debates in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology circa 1992, and details how the introduction of fMRI into the field at that time catalyzed a new wave of efforts to map complex human behavior to specific brain regions.

Mapping effective connectivity in the human brain with concurrent intracranial electrical stimulation and BOLD-fMRI.

Background: Understanding brain function requires knowledge of how one brain region causally influences another. This information is difficult to obtain directly in the human brain, and is instead typically inferred from resting-state fMRI.

New Method: Here, we demonstrate the safety and scientific promise of a novel and complementary approach: concurrent electrical stimulation and fMRI (es-fMRI) at 3T in awake neurosurgical patients with implanted depth electrodes.

Canceled connections: Lesion-derived network mapping helps explain differences in performance on a complex decision-making task.

Studies of patients with brain damage have highlighted a broad neural network of limbic and prefrontal areas as important for adaptive decision-making. However, some patients with damage outside these regions have impaired decision-making behavior, and the behavioral impairments observed in these cases are often attributed to the general variability in behavior following brain damage, rather than a deficit in a specific brain-behavior relationship. A novel approach, lesion-derived network mapping, uses healthy subject resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) data to infer the areas that would be connected with each patient's lesion area in healthy adults.

Sex-related functional asymmetry of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in regard to decision-making under risk and ambiguity.

Previous work has provided preliminary indication of sex-related functional asymmetry of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in social and emotional functions and complex decision-making. Findings have been inconsistent, and based on small numbers of patients. Given the rarity of these neurological cases, replicable results across studies are important to build evidence for sex-related functional asymmetry of the vmPFC.

Preschool externalizing behavior predicts gender-specific variation in adolescent neural structure.

Dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus is believed to underlie the development of much psychopathology. However, to date only limited longitudinal data relate early behavior with neural structure later in life. Our objective was to examine the relationship of early life externalizing behavior with adolescent brain structure.

Improved Statistical Power with a Sparse Shape Model in Detecting an Aging Effect in the Hippocampus and Amygdala.

The sparse regression framework has been widely used in medical image processing and analysis. However, it has been rarely used in anatomical studies. We present a sparse shape modeling framework using the Laplace-Beltrami (LB) eigenfunctions of the underlying shape and show its improvement of statistical power.

Behavioral problems after early life stress: contributions of the hippocampus and amygdala.

Background: Early life stress (ELS) can compromise development, with higher amounts of adversity linked to behavioral problems. To understand this linkage, a growing body of research has examined two brain regions involved with socioemotional functioning-amygdala and hippocampus. Yet empirical studies have reported increases, decreases, and no differences within human and nonhuman animal samples exposed to different forms of ELS.

Two systems drive attention to rewards.

How options are framed can dramatically influence choice preference. While salience of information plays a central role in this effect, precisely how it is mediated by attentional processes remains unknown. Current models assume a simple relationship between attention and choice, according to which preference should be uniformly biased towards the attended item over the whole time-course of a decision between similarly valued items.

Robust Automated Amygdala Segmentation via Multi-Atlas Diffeomorphic Registration.

Here, we describe a novel method for volumetric segmentation of the amygdala from MRI images collected from 35 human subjects. This approach is adapted from open-source techniques employed previously with the hippocampus (Suh et al., 2011; Wang et al.