We report on the case of an adolescent with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy exhibiting compulsory sporadic voluntary movement. These movements entailed the deliberate act of touching her forehead with her hand and were triggered by a short and indefinable cephalic sensation. Upon inquiry regarding the nature of this movement, the patient reported a sudden perception of a peculiar event localized "inside her head".
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe evaluation of cognitive functions interactions has become increasingly implemented in the cognition exploration. In the present study, we propose to examine the organization of the cognitive network in healthy participants through the analysis of behavioral performances in several cognitive domains. Specifically, we aim to explore cognitive interactions profiles, in terms of cognitive network, and as a function of participants' handedness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRasmussen's encephalitis is a rare neurological pathology affecting one cerebral hemisphere, therefore, posing unique challenges. Patients may undergo hemispherectomy, a surgical procedure after which cognitive development occurs in the isolated contralateral hemisphere. This rare situation provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate brain plasticity and cognitive recovery at a hemispheric level.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Emotion Regulation plays a crucial role in human's daily lives. Extensive research has shown that people with different attachment orientations exhibit divergencies in how they perform emotion regulation strategies.
Methods: 44 adults performed an experimental emotion regulation task in which they were instructed to attend, reappraise, or suppress their emotions while viewing negative and neutral images taken from (IAPS).
The planning process, characterized by the capability to formulate an organized plan to reach a goal, is essential for human goal-directed behavior. Since planning is compromised in several neuropsychiatric disorders, the implementation of proper clinical and experimental tests to examine planning is critical. Due to the nature of the deployment of planning, in which several cognitive domains participate, the assessment of planning and the design of behavioral paradigms coupled with neuroimaging methods are current challenges in cognitive neuroscience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies showed that motor expertise was found to induce improvement in language processing. Grounded and situated approaches attributed this effect to an underlying automatic simulation of the motor experience elicited by action words, similar to motor imagery (MI), and suggest shared representations of action conceptualization. Interestingly, recent results also suggest that the mental simulation of action by MI training induces motor-system modifications and improves motor performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Rasmussen encephalitis is a rare chronic neurological pathology frequently treated with functional hemispherectomy (or hemispherotomy). This surgical procedure frees patients of their severe epilepsy associated with the disease but may induce cognitive disorders and notably language alterations after disconnection of the left hemisphere.
Observations: The authors describe longitudinally 3 cases of female patients with Rasmussen encephalitis who underwent left hemispherotomy in childhood and benefited from a favorable cognitive outcome.
Language processing is a highly integrative function, intertwining linguistic operations (processing the language code intentionally used for communication) and extra-linguistic processes (e.g., attention monitoring, predictive inference, long-term memory).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The exact architecture of the human auditory cortex remains a subject of debate, with discrepancies between functional and microstructural studies. In a hierarchical framework for sensory perception, simple sound perception is expected to take place in the primary auditory cortex, while the processing of complex, or more integrated perceptions is proposed to rely on associative and higher-order cortices.
Objectives: We hypothesize that auditory symptoms induced by direct electrical stimulation (DES) offer a window into the architecture of the brain networks involved in auditory hallucinations and illusions.
The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of Motor Imagery (MI) training on language comprehension. In line with literature suggesting an intimate relationship between the language and the motor system, we proposed that a MI-training could improve language comprehension by facilitating lexico-semantic access. In two experiments, participants were assigned to a kinesthetic motor-imagery training (KMI) group, in which they had to imagine making upper-limb movements, or to a static visual imagery training (SVI) group, in which they had to mentally visualize pictures of landscapes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the present preregistered study, we evaluated the possibility of a shared cognitive mechanism during verbal and non-verbal tasks and therefore the implication of domain-general cognitive control during language comprehension. We hypothesized that a behavioral cost will be observed during a dual-task including both verbal and non-verbal difficult processing. Specifically, to test this claim, we designed a dual-task paradigm involving: an auditory language comprehension task (sentence comprehension) and a non-verbal Flanker task (including congruent and incongruent trials).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the absence of any neuropsychiatric condition, older adults may show declining performance in several cognitive processes and among them, in retrieving and producing words, reflected in slower responses and even reduced accuracy compared to younger adults. To overcome this difficulty, healthy older adults implement compensatory strategies, which are the focus of this paper. We provide a review of mainstream findings on deficient mechanisms and possible neurocognitive strategies used by older adults to overcome the deleterious effects of age on lexical production.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive planning, the ability to develop a sequenced plan to achieve a goal, plays a crucial role in human goal-directed behavior. However, the specific role of frontal structures in planning is unclear. We used a novel and ecological task, that allowed us to separate the planning period from the execution period.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research showed that mental rumination, considered as a form of repetitive and negative inner speech, is associated with increased facial muscular activity. However, the relation between these muscular activations and the underlying mental processes is still unclear. In this study, we tried to separate the facial electromyographic correlates of induced rumination related to either i) mechanisms of (inner) speech production or ii) rumination as a state of pondering on negative affects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies have highlighted the importance of considering cognitive functions from a dynamic and interactive perspective and multiple evidence was brought for a language and memory interaction. In this study performed with healthy participants, we present a new protocol entitled GE2REC that interactively accesses the neural representation of language-and-memory network. This protocol consists of three runs related to each other, providing a link between tasks, in order to assure an interactive measure of linguistic and episodic memory processes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDirect electrical stimulation (DES) at 50 Hz is used as a gold standard to map cognitive functions but little is known about its ability to map large-scale networks and specific subnetwork. In the present study, we aim to propose a new methodological approach to evaluate the specific hypothesis suggesting that language errors/dysfunction induced by DES are the result of large-scale network modification rather than of a single cortical region, which explains that similar language symptoms may be observed after stimulation of different cortical regions belonging to this network. We retrospectively examined 29 patients suffering from focal drug-resistant epilepsy who benefitted from stereo-electroencephalographic (SEEG) exploration and exhibited language symptoms during a naming task following 50 Hz DES.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough having a long history of scrutiny in experimental psychology, it is still controversial whether wilful inner speech (covert speech) production is accompanied by specific activity in speech muscles. We present the results of a preregistered experiment looking at the electromyographic correlates of both overt speech and inner speech production of two phonetic classes of nonwords. An automatic classification approach was undertaken to discriminate between two articulatory features contained in nonwords uttered in both overt and covert speech.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman brain has developed mechanisms to efficiently decode sensory information according to perceptual categories of high prevalence in the environment, such as faces, symbols, objects. Neural activity produced within localized brain networks has been associated with the process that integrates both sensory bottom-up and cognitive top-down information processing. Yet, how specifically the different types and components of neural responses reflect the local networks' selectivity for categorical information processing is still unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The authors assessed the clinical relevance of preoperative task-induced high-frequency activity (HFA) for language mapping in patients with refractory epilepsy during stereoelectroencephalography recording. Although HFA evaluation was described as a putative biomarker of cognition, its clinical relevance for mapping language networks was assessed predominantly by studies using electrocorticography (ECOG).
Methods: Forty-two patients with epilepsy who underwent intracranial electrode implantation during both task-induced HFA and direct cortical stimulation (DCS) language mapping were evaluated.
The decision to process an incoming stimulus attentively - and to trigger a follow-up cascade of high-level processes - is strategic for the human brain as it becomes transiently unavailable to subsequent stimulus processing. In this study, we set to identify brain networks that carry out such evaluations. We therefore assessed the time-course of neural responses with intracerebral EEG in human patients during an attentional reading task, contrasting to-be-attended vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report two patients suffering from drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy to show how their neuroplasticity can be apprehended using a multimodal, integrative and clinically relevant approach. This is a proof of concept based on using multimodal data including: (1) white matter structural connectivity (DTI) of the main tracts involved in language and memory; (2) neurophysiological biomarkers (fMRI-BOLD signal and LI lateralization indices); and (3) cognitive scores as measured during the neuropsychological assessment. We characterized tri-modal data for each patient using a descriptive integrative approach, in terms of reorganization and by comparing with a group of healthy participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties.
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