Akinetic rigid symptoms are associated with decline in a cortical motor network in Parkinson's disease.

The akinetic/rigid (AR) motor subtype of Parkinson's Disease is associated with increased rates of motor and cognitive decline. Cross-sectional studies examining the neural correlates of AR have found abnormalities in both subcortical and cortical networks involved in motor planning and execution relative to controls. To better understand how these cross-sectional findings are implicated in the unique decline associated with the AR subtype, we examined whether baseline AR symptoms are associated with longitudinal decline of these networks, in contrast to other motor symptoms such as tremor.

Levodopa improves response inhibition and enhances striatal activation in early-stage Parkinson's disease.

Dopaminergic medications improve the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but their effect on response inhibition, a critical executive function, remains unclear. Previous studies primarily enrolled patients in more advanced stages of PD, when dopaminergic medication loses efficacy, and patients were typically on multiple medications. Here, we recruited 21 patients in early-stage PD on levodopa monotherapy and 37 age-matched controls to perform the stop-signal task during functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Preschool negative emotionality predicts activity and connectivity of the fusiform face area and amygdala in later childhood.

Negative emotionality (NE) refers to individual differences in the propensity to experience and react with negative emotions and is associated with increased risk of psychological disorder. However, research on the neural bases of NE has focused almost exclusively on amygdala activity during emotional face processing. This study broadened this framework by examining the relationship between observed NE in early childhood and subsequent neural responses to emotional faces in both the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA) in a late childhood/early adolescent sample.

Hemispheric Lateralization of Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Anterior Insula: Association with Age, Gender, and a Novelty-Seeking Trait.

Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) is widely used to examine cerebral functional organization. The imaging literature has described lateralization of insula activations during cognitive and affective processing. Evidence appears to support a role of the right-hemispheric insula in attentional orientation to salient stimulus, interoception, and physiological arousal, and a role of the left-hemispheric insula in cognitive and affective control, as well as perspective taking.

Relationship of cognitive strategy use to prospective memory performance in a diverse sample of nondemented older adults with varying degrees of cognitive complaints and impairment.

Although older adults typically have better performance on prospective memory (PM) tasks carried out in naturalistic settings, a paucity of research directly assesses older adults' use of compensatory strategies on such tasks. The current study investigates external memory strategy use during performance of a clinical PM test that features both short-term (in laboratory) and long-term (out of laboratory) subtasks (i.e.

Prospective memory on a novel clinical task in older adults with mild cognitive impairment and subjective cognitive decline.

Despite the relevance of prospective memory to everyday functioning and the ability to live independently, prospective memory tasks are rarely incorporated into clinical evaluations of older adults. We investigated the validity and clinical utility of a recently developed measure, the Royal Prince Alfred Prospective Memory Test (RPA-ProMem), in a demographically diverse, non-demented, community-dwelling sample of 257 older adults (mean age = 80.78 years, 67.