Mental health and behaviour in children with dystonia: Anxiety, challenging behaviour and the relationship to pain and self-esteem.

Purpose: To ascertain whether young people with dystonia are more likely than the general population to have mental health and/or behavioural difficulties, and to explore factors that may contribute to these difficulties.

Method: Using a quasi-experimental design, 50 young people with dystonia aged 7-17 and their carers were recruited from the Evelina London Children's Hospital. Young people completed the Beck Youth Inventories and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.

Pre- and postsurgical cognitive trajectories and quantitative MRI changes in Rasmussen syndrome.

Objective: To quantify the longitudinal cognitive trajectory, before and after surgery, of Rasmussen syndrome (RS), a rare disease characterized by focal epilepsy and progressive atrophy of one cerebral hemisphere.

Method: Thirty-two patients (mean age = 6.7 years; 17 male, 16 left hemispheres affected) were identified from hospital records.

Can complex visual discrimination deficits in amnesia be attributed to the medial temporal lobe? An investigation into the effects of medial temporal lobe damage on brain connectivity.

It has been suggested that complex visual discrimination deficits in patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage may be explained by damage or dysfunction beyond the MTL. We examined the resting functional networks and white matter connectivity of two amnesic patients who have consistently demonstrated discrimination impairments for complex object and/or spatial stimuli across a number of studies. Although exploratory analyses revealed some significant differences in comparison with neurologically healthy controls (more specifically in the patient with a larger MTL lesion), there were no obvious findings involving posterior occipital or posterior temporal regions, which can account entirely for their discrimination deficits.

A potential spatial working memory training task to improve both episodic memory and fluid intelligence.

One current challenge in cognitive training is to create a training regime that benefits multiple cognitive domains, including episodic memory, without relying on a large battery of tasks, which can be time-consuming and difficult to learn. By giving careful consideration to the neural correlates underlying episodic and working memory, we devised a computerized working memory training task in which neurologically healthy participants were required to monitor and detect repetitions in two streams of spatial information (spatial location and scene identity) presented simultaneously (i.e.

Disentangling spatial perception and spatial memory in the hippocampus: a univariate and multivariate pattern analysis fMRI study.

Although the role of the hippocampus in spatial cognition is well accepted, it is unclear whether its involvement is restricted to the mnemonic domain or also extends to perception. We used fMRI to scan neurologically healthy participants during a scene oddity judgment task that placed no explicit demand on long-term memory. Crucially, a surprise recognition test was administered after scanning so that each trial could be categorized not only according to oddity accuracy but also according to subsequent memory.

Human medial temporal lobe damage can disrupt the perception of single objects.

The idea that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), traditionally viewed as an exclusive memory system, may also subserve higher-order perception has been debated fiercely. To support this suggestion, monkey and human lesion studies have demonstrated that perirhinal cortex damage impairs complex object discrimination. The interpretation of these findings has, however, been disputed because these impairments may reflect a primary deficit in MTL-mediated working memory processes or, in the case of human patients, undetected damage to visual processing regions beyond the MTL.

Fornix microstructure correlates with recollection but not familiarity memory.

The fornix is the main tract between the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and medial diencephalon, both of which are critical for episodic memory. The precise involvement of the fornix in memory, however, has been difficult to ascertain since damage to this tract in human amnesics is invariably accompanied by atrophy to surrounding structures. We used diffusion-weighted imaging to investigate whether individual differences in fornix white matter microstructure in neurologically healthy participants were related to differences in memory as assessed by two recognition tasks.

Investigating the interaction between spatial perception and working memory in the human medial temporal lobe.

There has been considerable debate surrounding the functions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Although this region has been traditionally thought to subserve long-term declarative memory only, recent evidence suggests a role in short-term working memory and even higher order perception. To investigate this issue, functional neuroimaging was used to investigate the involvement of the MTL in spatial scene perception and working memory.