Resting-State Network Plasticity Following Category Learning Depends on Sensory Modality.

Learning new categories is fundamental to cognition, occurring in daily life through various sensory modalities. However, it is not well known how acquiring new categories can modulate the brain networks. Resting-state functional connectivity is an effective method for detecting short-term brain alterations induced by various modality-based learning experiences.

Conception and development of a neurological registry of patients with persistent health impairments following work-related COVID-19 disease in Germany.

Background: Healthcare and social workers had an increased occupational risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 during the pandemic. Some developed long-lasting symptoms known as post-COVID syndrome (PCS). To assess the consequences of COVID-19 for individuals insured by the German Social Accident Insurance, the BG hospitals (Berufsgenossenschaftliche Kliniken: clinics for occupational accident insurance) established an interdisciplinary diagnostic programme.

Functional MRI of imprinting memory in awake newborn domestic chicks.

Filial imprinting, a crucial ethological paradigm, provides insights into the neurobiology of early learning and its long-term impact on behaviour. To date, invasive techniques like autoradiography or lesions have been used to study it, limiting the exploration of whole brain networks. Recent advances in fMRI for avian brains now open new windows to explore bird's brain functions at the network level.

Posttraumatic headache: pain related evoked potentials (PREP) and conditioned pain modulation (CPM) to assess the pain modulatory function.

Posttraumatic headache (PTH) is common following traumatic brain injury and impacts quality of life. We investigated descending pain modulation as one possible mechanism for PTH and correlated it to clinical measures. Pain-related evoked potentials (PREP) were recorded in 26 PTH-patients and 20 controls after electrical stimulation at the right hand and forehead with concentric surface electrodes.

Microstructural properties of attention-related white matter tracts are associated with the renewal effect of extinction.

The tendency to show the renewal effect of extinction appears as an intra-individually stable, reproducible processing strategy associated with differential patterns of BOLD activation in hippocampus, iFG and vmPFC, as well as differential resting-state functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and the dorsal attention network. Also, pharmacological modulations of the noradrenergic system that influence attentional processing have partially different effects upon individuals with (REN) and without (NoREN) a propensity for renewal. However, it is as yet unknown whether REN and NoREN individuals differ regarding microstructural properties in attention-related white matter (WM) regions, and whether such differences are related to noradrenergic processing.

Microstructural differences in the cingulum and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus are associated with (extinction) learning.

Cognitive functions, such as learning and memory processes, depend on effective communication between brain regions which is facilitated by white matter tracts (WMT). We investigated the microstructural properties and the contribution of WMT to extinction learning and memory in a predictive learning task. Forty-two healthy participants completed an extinction learning paradigm without a fear component.

Morphological Differentiation of Corneal Inflammatory Cells.

Purpose: Corneal confocal microscopy is a noninvasive imaging technique to analyze corneal nerve fibers and corneal inflammatory cells (CICs). The amount of CICs is a potential biomarker of disease activity in chronic autoinflammatory diseases. To date, there are no standardized criteria for the morphological characterization of CICs.

Functional MRI of imprinting memory: a new avenue for neurobiology of early learning.

Filial imprinting, a crucial ethological paradigm, provides insights into the neurobiology of early learning and its long-term impact on behaviour. To date, only invasive techniques, such as autoradiography or lesion, have been employed to understand this behaviour. The primary limitation of these methods lies in their constrained access to the entire brain, impeding the exploration of brain networks crucial at various stages of this paradigm.

Dissimilarities of neural representations of extinction trials are associated with extinction learning performance and renewal level.

Introduction: Renewal of extinguished responses is associated with higher activity in specific extinction-relevant brain regions, i.e., hippocampus (HC), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and ventromedial PFC (vmPFC).

Dopaminergic D2-like receptor stimulation affects attention on contextual information and modulates BOLD activation of extinction-related brain areas.

Contextual information is essential for learning and memory processes and plays a crucial role during the recall of extinction memory, and in the renewal effect, which is the context-dependent recovery of an extinguished response. The dopaminergic system is known to be involved in regulating attentional processes by shifting attention to novel and salient contextual cues. Higher dopamine levels are associated with a better recall of previously learned stimulus-outcome associations and enhanced encoding, as well as retrieval of contextual information which promotes renewal.

Anodal transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation influences the amplitude of pain-related evoked potentials in healthy subjects.

It has already been described that transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation (tsDCS) can selectively influence nociceptive evoked potentials. This study is the first aiming to prove an influence of tsDCS on pain-related evoked potentials (PREP) using concentric surface electrodes (CE), whose nociceptive specificity is still under discussion. 28 healthy subjects participated in this sham-controlled, double-blind cross-over study.

Cortisol decreases activation in extinction related brain areas resulting in an impaired recall of context-dependent extinction memory.

Conditioned responding gradually stops during successful extinction learning. The renewal effect is defined as the recovery of a extinguished conditioned response when the context of extinction is different from acquisition. The stress hormone cortisol is known to have an influence on extinction memory and associative learning.

Cortical excitability in human somatosensory and visual cortex: implications for plasticity and learning - a minireview.

The balance of excitation and inhibition plays a key role in plasticity and learning. A frequently used, reliable approach to assess intracortical inhibition relies on measuring paired-pulse behavior. Moreover, recent developments of magnetic resonance spectroscopy allows measuring GABA and glutamate concentrations.

Evidence- and data-driven classification of low back pain via artificial intelligence: Protocol of the PREDICT-LBP study.

In patients presenting with low back pain (LBP), once specific causes are excluded (fracture, infection, inflammatory arthritis, cancer, cauda equina and radiculopathy) many clinicians pose a diagnosis of non-specific LBP. Accordingly, current management of non-specific LBP is generic. There is a need for a classification of non-specific LBP that is both data- and evidence-based assessing multi-dimensional pain-related factors in a large sample size.

Pain-related evoked potentials with concentric surface electrodes in patients and healthy subjects: a systematic review.

Pain-related evoked potentials with concentric surface electrodes (PREP with CE) have been increasingly used in the diagnostics of polyneuropathies as well as in pain research. However, the study results are partly inconsistent regarding their utility to distinguish between normal and abnormal findings. The present systematic review aimed to summarise and compare study results, where PREP with CE were used in healthy subjects or patients and to identify possible influencing factors.

Hypnotic suggestions cognitively penetrate tactile perception through top-down modulation of semantic contents.

Perception is subject to ongoing alterations by learning and top-down influences. Although abundant studies have shown modulation of perception by attention, motivation, content and context, there is an unresolved controversy whether these examples provide true evidence that perception is penetrable by cognition. Here we show that tactile perception assessed as spatial discrimination can be instantaneously and systematically altered merely by the semantic content during hypnotic suggestions.

Do oral contraceptives modulate the effects of stress induction on one-session exposure efficacy and generalization in women?

Rationale: The administration of glucocorticoids (GC) as an adjunct to exposure represents a promising strategy to improve one-session exposure outcome in anxiety disorders. It remains to be determined whether similar effects can be induced with the use of acute stress. Furthermore, the possible modulation of exposure effects by hormonal factors (e.

Quantitative muscle magnetic resonance imaging depicts microstructural abnormalities but no signs of inflammation or dystrophy in post-COVID-19 condition.

Background And Purpose: Post-COVID-19 condition (PCC) has high impact on quality of life, with myalgia and fatigue affecting at least 25% of PCC patients. This case-control study aims to noninvasively assess muscular alterations via quantitative muscle magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as possible mechanisms for ongoing musculoskeletal complaints and premature exhaustion in PCC.

Methods: Quantitative muscle MRI was performed on a 3 Tesla MRI scanner of the whole legs in PCC patients compared to age- and sex-matched healthy controls, including a Dixon sequence to determine muscle fat fraction (FF), a multi-echo spin-echo sequence for quantitative water mapping reflecting putative edema, and a diffusion-weighted spin-echo echo-planar imaging sequence to assess microstructural alterations.

NMDA receptor-mediated processing in inferior frontal gyrus facilitates acquisition and extinction learning and strengthens renewal.

While the renewal effect of extinction is considered to be invoked by attention to context during the extinction phase, there is also evidence that processing during initial learning (acquisition) may be important for later renewal. A noradrenergic agonist and a dopaminergic antagonist, administered before acquisition, did not affect renewal, however, the effects of NMDAergic neurotransmission in this regard are as yet unknown. In a previous study, administration of a single dose of the NMDA agonist d-cycloserine (DCS) before extinction learning facilitated extinction in the context of acquisition (AAA), but had no effect upon renewal.

[Neurological and psychiatric expert assessment of post-COVID syndrome].

Infections with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) can lead to a multiorgan disease and subsequently to very different clinical manifestations of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In addition to acute symptoms, the long-term complaints in the context of the infection, known as long or post-COVID syndrome, are increasingly attracting attention. With respect to social insurance systems, expert opinions of such problems will become more and more important, whereby neurological and psychiatric symptoms are the most frequent complaints.

Robustness and stability of volume-based tractography in a multicenter setting.

Muscle diffusion tensor imaging (mDTI)-based tractography is a promising tool with which to detect subclinical changes in muscle injuries and to evaluate pathophysiology in neuromuscular diseases. Classic region of interest (ROI)-based tractography is very time-consuming and requires an examiner with extensive experience. (Semi)automatic approaches such as volume-based tractography (VBT) can diminish this problem but its robustness and stability are unknown.

Visual and Tactile Sensory Systems Share Common Features in Object Recognition.

Although we use our visual and tactile sensory systems interchangeably for object recognition on a daily basis, little is known about the mechanism underlying this ability. This study examined how 3D shape features of objects form two congruent and interchangeable visual and tactile perceptual spaces in healthy male and female participants. Since active exploration plays an important role in shape processing, a virtual reality environment was used to visually explore 3D objects called digital embryos without using the tactile sense.