Multimodal creativity assessments following acute and sustained microdosing of lysergic acid diethylamide.

Introduction: Enhanced creativity is often cited as an effect of microdosing (taking repeated low doses of a psychedelic drug). There have been recent efforts to validate the reported effects of microdosing, however creativity remains a difficult construct to quantify.

Objectives: The current study aimed to assess microdosing's effects on creativity using a multimodal battery of tests as part of a randomised controlled trial of microdosing lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

Reassessing the Functional Significance of Blood Oxygen Level Dependent Signal Variability.

BOLD signal variability (SDBOLD) has emerged as a unique measure of the adaptive properties of neural systems that facilitate fast, stable responding, based on claims that SDBOLD is independent of mean BOLD signal (meanBOLD) and is a powerful predictor of behavioral performance. We challenge these two claims. First, the apparent independence of SDBOLD and meanBOLD may reflect the presence of deactivations; we hypothesize that although SDBOLD may not be related to raw meanBOLD, it will be linearly related to "absolute" meanBOLD.

Neural substrates of specific and general autobiographical memory retrieval in younger and older adults.

Healthy aging is associated with a shift away from the retrieval of specific episodic autobiographical memories (AMs), towards more general and semanticized memories. Younger adults modulate activity in the default mode network according to the episodic specificity of AM retrieval. However, little is known about whether aging disrupts this neural modulation.

Longitudinal study of energy, neurosensory and eating responses durinG pregnancY (ENERGY cohort): A study protocol.

Background And Aims: Physiological changes that occur during pregnancy can have long-term impacts on metabolism and neurosensory responses to food, which can impact nutrition and health outcomes. The ENERGY cohort is a longitudinal study that aims to capitalizes on pregnancy as a natural model of metabolic reprogramming in order to understand the neurosensory mechanisms underpinning links between metabolism and dietary behaviour. The study objectives are to test for multi-sensory shifts during pregnancy, and the effect of sensory changes on dietary choices and bodyweights, and to identify neurosensory mechanisms that determine macronutrient selection before and after pregnancy.

Altered structural connectome of children with auditory processing disorder: a diffusion MRI study.

Auditory processing disorder (APD) is a listening impairment that some school-aged children may experience despite having normal peripheral hearing. Recent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revealed an alteration in regional functional brain topology in children with APD. However, little is known about the structural organization in APD.

Altered brain network topology in children with auditory processing disorder: A resting-state multi-echo fMRI study.

Children with auditory processing disorder (APD) experience hearing difficulties, particularly in the presence of competing sounds, despite having normal audiograms. There is considerable debate on whether APD symptoms originate from bottom-up (e.g.

Dementia Prevention Research Clinic: a longitudinal study investigating factors influencing the development of Alzheimer's disease in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Aotearoa New Zealand's population is ageing. Increasing life expectancy is accompanied by increases in prevalence of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and ageing-related disorders. The multicentre Dementia Prevention Research Clinic longitudinal study aims to improve understanding of AD and dementia in Aotearoa, in order to develop interventions that delay or prevent progression to dementia.

Reproducibility and repeatability of magnetic resonance imaging in dementia.

Purpose: Individualised predictive models of cognitive decline require disease-monitoring markers that are repeatable. For wide-spread adoption, such markers also need to be reproducible at different locations. This study assessed the repeatability and reproducibility of MRI markers derived from a dementia protocol.

Spatial variation of perfusion MRI reflects cognitive decline in mild cognitive impairment and early dementia.

Cerebral blood flow (CBF) measured with arterial spin labelling (ASL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reflects cerebral perfusion, related to metabolism, and arterial transit time (ATT), related to vascular health. Our aim was to investigate the spatial coefficient of variation (sCoV) of CBF maps as a surrogate for ATT, in volunteers meeting criteria for subjective cognitive decline (SCD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and probable Alzheimer's dementia (AD). Whole-brain pseudo continuous ASL MRI was performed at 3 T in 122 participants (controls = 20, SCD = 44, MCI = 45 and AD = 13) across three sites in New Zealand.

Mood Responses and Regulation Strategies Used During COVID-19 Among Boxers and Coaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to daily life and in the first wave in the UK, it led to a societal shutdown including playing sport and concern was placed for the mental health of athletes. Identifying mood states experienced in lockdown and self-regulating strategies is useful for the development of interventions to help mood management. Whilst this can be done on a general level, examination of sport-specific effects and the experience of athletes and coaches can help develop interventions grounded in real world experiences.

Characterization of optofluidic devices for the sorting of sub-micrometer particles.

In this work, we investigate methods of fabricating a device for the optical actuation of nanoparticles. To create the microfluidic channel, we pursued three fabrication methods: SU-8 to molded polydimethylsiloxane soft lithography, laser etching of glass, and deep reactive ion etching of fused silica. We measured the surface roughness of the etched sidewalls, and the laser power transmission through each device.

Creative, internally-directed cognition is associated with reduced BOLD variability.

In a range of externally-directed tasks, intra-individual variability of fMRI BOLD signal has been shown to be a stronger predictor of cognitive performance than mean BOLD signal. BOLD variability's strong association with cognitive performance is hypothesised to be due to it capturing the dynamic range of neural systems. Although increased BOLD variability is also speculated to play a role in internally-directed thought, particularly when creative and flexible cognition is required, there is a relative lack of research exploring whether BOLD variability is related to internally-directed cognition.

Relational processing demands and the role of spatial context in the construction of episodic simulations.

Reports on differences between remembering the past and imagining the future have led to the hypothesis that constructing future events is a more cognitively demanding process. However, factors that influence these increased demands, such as whether the event has been previously constructed and the types of details comprising the event, have remained relatively unexplored. Across two experiments, we examined how these factors influence the process of constructing event representations by having participants repeatedly construct events and measuring how construction times and a range of phenomenological ratings changed across time points.

Lens-axicon separation to tailor aberration free focused Bessel-Gaussian beams in the paraxial regime.

Lens-axicon doublets have been used to produce Bessel-Gaussian beams, a narrow non-diffracting beam of relatively constant width. One problem of using Bessel-Gaussian beams is that there is a compromise between achieving a long effective focal length with a small central core radius and distributing the beam intensity between the central core and the off-axis rings. Here, we explore the advantage of tuning the lens-axicon separation, which allows us to have an additional degree of freedom to tailor the beam profile.

Constructive episodic simulation, flexible recombination, and memory errors.

According to Mahr & Csibra (M&C), the view that the constructive nature of episodic memory is related to its role in simulating future events has difficulty explaining why memory is often accurate. We hold this view, but disagree with their conclusion. Here we consider ideas and evidence regarding flexible recombination processes in episodic retrieval that accommodate both accuracy and distortion.

Reading network in dyslexia: Similar, yet different.

Dyslexia is a developmental disorder characterized by reading and phonological difficulties, yet important questions remain regarding its underlying neural correlates. In this study, we used partial least squares (PLS), a multivariate analytic technique, to investigate the neural networks used by dyslexics while performing a word-rhyming task. Although the overall reading network was largely similar in dyslexics and typical readers, it did not correlate with behavior in the same way in the two groups.

Scene Construction and Relational Processing: Separable Constructs?

Imagining hypothetical events often entails the construction of a detailed mental simulation. Despite recent advances, debate still surrounds the fundamental constructive process underpinning simulations supported by the hippocampus. Palombo et al.

Identifying grey matter changes in schizotypy using partial least squares correlation.

Neuroimaging research into the brain structure of schizophrenia patients has shown consistent reductions in grey matter volume relative to healthy controls. Examining structural differences in individuals with high levels of schizotypy may help elucidate the course of disorder progression, and provide further support for the schizotypy-schizophrenia continuum. Thus far, the few studies investigating grey matter differences in schizotypy have produced inconsistent results.

The Simpson's paradox and fMRI: Similarities and differences between functional connectivity measures derived from within-subject and across-subject correlations.

Task-related functional connectivity (fc-MRI) indexes the interaction of brain regions during cognitive tasks. Two general classes of methods exist to investigate fc-MRI: the most widely-used method calculates temporal correlations between voxels/regions within subjects, and then determines if within-subject correlations are reliable across subjects (ws-fcMRI); the other calculates the average (BOLD) signal within voxels/regions and then performs correlations across subjects (as-fcMRI). That is, while both methods rely on correlational techniques, the level at which correlations are calculated is fundamentally different.

Routes to the past: neural substrates of direct and generative autobiographical memory retrieval.

Models of autobiographical memory propose two routes to retrieval depending on cue specificity. When available cues are specific and personally-relevant, a memory can be directly accessed. However, when available cues are generic, one must engage a generative retrieval process to produce more specific cues to successfully access a relevant memory.

Age-related neural changes in autobiographical remembering and imagining.

Numerous neuroimaging studies have revealed that in young adults, remembering the past and imagining the future engage a common core network. Although it has been observed that older adults engage a similar network during these tasks, it is unclear whether or not they activate this network in a similar manner to young adults. Young and older participants completed two autobiographical tasks (imagining future events and recalling past events) in addition to a semantic-visuospatial control task.

Hippocampal contributions to the episodic simulation of specific and general future events.

Recent studies have demonstrated that remembering past experiences and imagining future scenarios recruits a core network including the hippocampus. Even so, constructing future events engages the hippocampus more than remembering past events. This fMRI study examined whether increased hippocampal activity for future events includes both specific and general events.

Cerebral asymmetries: complementary and independent processes.

Most people are right-handed and left-cerebrally dominant for speech, leading historically to the general notion of left-hemispheric dominance, and more recently to genetic models proposing a single lateralizing gene. This hypothetical gene can account for higher incidence of right-handers in those with left cerebral dominance for speech. It remains unclear how this dominance relates to the right-cerebral dominance for some nonverbal functions such as spatial or emotional processing.

Causal reasoning in New Caledonian crows: Ruling out spatial analogies and sampling error.

A large number of studies have failed to find conclusive evidence for causal reasoning in nonhuman animals. For example, when animals are required to avoid a trap while extracting a reward from a tube they appear to learn about the surface-level features of the task, rather than about the task's causal regularities. We recently reported that New Caledonian crows solved a two-trap-tube task and then were able to immediately solve a novel, visually distinct problem, the trap-table task.