Using imagination and the contents of memory to create new scene and object representations: A functional MRI study.

Humans can use the contents of memory to construct scenarios and events that they have not encountered before, a process colloquially known as imagination. Much of our current understanding of the neural mechanisms mediating imagination is limited by paradigms that rely on participants' subjective reports of imagined content. Here, we used a novel behavioral paradigm that was designed to systematically evaluate the contents of an individual's imagination.

Late-Life Homelessness: A Definition to Spark Action and Change.

Background And Objectives: Comprehensive definitions of social issues and populations can set the stage for the development of responsive policies and practices. Yet despite the rise of late-life homelessness, the phenomenon remains narrowly understood and ill-defined.

Research Design And Methods: This article and the definition that ensued are based on the reconceptualization of interview data derived from a critical ethnography conducted in Montreal, Canada, with older homeless persons (N = 40) and service providers (N = 20).

Use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Technologies to Support Resilience and Skill-Building in Caregivers of Persons With Dementia: A Scoping Review.

Dementia presents a growing public health challenge with most affected individuals living at home, placing significant responsibility on their caregivers. Various interventions, from traditional support groups and education programs to emerging technologies, and more specifically virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), aim to enhance caregiver skills. While VR/AR shows promise in educating and fostering empathy among caregivers and healthcare professionals, its overall effectiveness and practicality in older adults and dementia care warrant further exploration.

Supported decision-making with persons with dementia: a scoping review protocol in partnership with lived experts.

Introduction: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities asserts that all persons with disabilities have the right to receive the support they require to participate in decisions that affect them. Yet, persons with dementia continue to be excluded from decisions on issues that matter to them. Our planned scoping review seeks to address this gap by documenting the current knowledge on supported decision-making for persons with dementia and informing the next steps for research and practice.

Neuroanatomical dimensions in medication-free individuals with major depressive disorder and treatment response to SSRI antidepressant medications or placebo.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a heterogeneous clinical syndrome with widespread subtle neuroanatomical correlates. Our objective was to identify the neuroanatomical dimensions that characterize MDD and predict treatment response to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants or placebo. In the COORDINATE-MDD consortium, raw MRI data were shared from international samples ( = 1,384) of medication-free individuals with first-episode and recurrent MDD ( = 685) in a current depressive episode of at least moderate severity, but not treatment-resistant depression, as well as healthy controls ( = 699).

Can 'What Is Known' about Social Isolation and Loneliness Interventions Sufficiently Inform the Clinical Practice of Health Care and Social Service Professionals Who Work with Older Adults? Exploring Knowledge-to-Practice Gaps.

Establishing intervention effectiveness is an important component of a broader knowledge translation (KT) process. However, mobilizing the implementation of these interventions into practice is perhaps the most important aspect of the KT cycle. The purpose of the current study was to conduct an umbrella review to (a) identify promising interventions for SI&L in older adults, (b) interpret (translate) the findings to inform clinical knowledge and practice interventions in different settings and contexts, and (c) highlight research gaps that may hinder the uptake of these interventions in practice.

Consent and Inclusion of People Living with Dementia (PLWD) in Research: Establishing a Canadian Agenda for Inclusive Rights-Based Practices.

Background: People living with dementia (PLWD) may want to participate in research, but the guidelines and processes enacted across various contexts may prohibit this from happening.

Objective: Understanding the experiences of people with lived experiences of dementia requires meaningful inclusion in research, as is consistent with rights-based perspectives. Currently, the inclusion of PLWD in Canadian research is complex, and guidelines and conceptual frameworks have not been fully developed.

Multiple system atrophy with amyloid-β-predominant Alzheimer's disease neuropathologic change.

Multiple system atrophy is a neurodegenerative disease with α-synuclein pathology predominating in the striatonigral and olivopontocerebellar systems. Mixed pathologies are considered to be of low frequency and mostly comprise primary age-related tauopathy or low levels of Alzheimer's disease-related neuropathologic change. Therefore, the concomitant presence of different misfolded proteins in the same brain region is less likely in multiple system atrophy.

Evaluating the impact of a national geriatric mental health ECHO educational program on healthcare providers' practice.

Project Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes (ECHO) enables healthcare providers to share knowledge and best practices via telementoring. The ECHO model builds provider capacity and improves care for patients with a variety of health conditions. This study describes a Canada-wide National ECHO pilot project in the area of geriatric mental health and reports on the program's impact on providers' care practices.

The time course of stimulus-specific perceptual learning.

Practice on perceptual tasks can lead to long-lasting, stimulus-specific improvements. Rapid stimulus-specific learning, assessed 24 hours after practice, has been found with just 105 practice trials in a face identification task. However, a much longer time course for stimulus-specific learning has been found in other tasks.

The Relationship between Neurobiological Function and Inflammation in Depressed Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review.

Introduction: Neurobiological dysfunction is associated with depression in children and adolescents. While research in adult depression suggests that inflammation may underlie the association between depression and brain alterations, it is unclear if altered levels of inflammatory markers provoke neurobiological dysfunction in early-onset depression. The aim of this scoping review was to provide an overview of existing literature investigating the potential interaction between neurobiological function and inflammation in depressed children and adolescents.

Perception and memory-based representations of facial emotions: Associations with personality functioning, affective states and recognition abilities.

Personality traits and affective states are associated with biases in facial emotion perception. However, the precise personality impairments and affective states that underlie these biases remain largely unknown. To investigate how relevant factors influence facial emotion perception and recollection, Experiment 1 employed an image reconstruction approach in which community-dwelling adults (N = 89) rated the similarity of pairs of facial expressions, including those recalled from memory.

Functional neuroimaging biomarkers of anhedonia response to escitalopram plus adjunct aripiprazole treatment for major depressive disorder.

Background: Identifying neuroimaging biomarkers of antidepressant response may help guide treatment decisions and advance precision medicine.

Aims: To examine the relationship between anhedonia and functional neurocircuitry in key reward processing brain regions in people with major depressive disorder receiving aripiprazole adjunct therapy with escitalopram.

Method: Data were collected as part of the CAN-BIND-1 study.

Contribution of internal noise and calculation efficiency to face discrimination deficits in older adults.

Classification images (CIs) measured in a face discrimination task differ significantly between older and younger observers. These age differences are consistent with the hypothesis that older adults sample diagnostic face information less efficiently, or have higher levels of internal noise, compared to younger adults. The current experiments assessed the relative contributions of efficiency and internal noise to age differences in face discrimination using the external noise masking and double-pass response consistency paradigms.

Enhanced mind-matter interactions following rTMS induced frontal lobe inhibition.

A major barrier to acceptance of psi is that effects are small and hard to replicate. To address this issue, we developed a novel neurobiological model to study this controversial phenomenon based upon the concept that the brain may act as a psi-inhibitory filter. Our previous research in individuals with frontal lobe damage suggests that this filter includes the left medial middle frontal region.

Organization of pRF size along the AP axis of the hippocampus and adjacent medial temporal cortex is related to specialization for scenes versus faces.

The hippocampus is largely recognized for its integral contributions to memory processing. By contrast, its role in perceptual processing remains less clear. Hippocampal properties vary along the anterior-posterior (AP) axis.

Auditory and reward structures reflect the pleasure of musical expectancies during naturalistic listening.

Enjoying music consistently engages key structures of the neural auditory and reward systems such as the right superior temporal gyrus (R STG) and ventral striatum (VS). Expectations seem to play a central role in this effect, as preferences reliably vary according to listeners' uncertainty about the musical future and surprise about the musical past. Accordingly, VS activity reflects the pleasure of musical surprise, and exhibits stronger correlations with R STG activity as pleasure grows.

Menopause Status and Within-Group Differences in Chronological Age Affect the Functional Neural Correlates of Spatial Context Memory in Middle-Aged Females.

Reductions in the ability to encode and retrieve past experiences in rich spatial contextual detail (episodic memory) are apparent by midlife-a time when most females experience spontaneous menopause. Yet, little is known about how menopause status affects episodic memory-related brain activity at encoding and retrieval in middle-aged premenopausal and postmenopausal females, and whether any observed group differences in brain activity and memory performance correlate with chronological age within group. We conducted an event-related task fMRI study of episodic memory for spatial context to address this knowledge gap.

Retrieval of temporal structure at recall can occur automatically.

Temporal-structure, namely, the order in which events unfold over time, is one of the fundamental principles of episodic memory organization. A seminal empirical demonstration of the prominence of temporal structure in memory organization is the Temporal Contiguity Effect (TCE), whereby the proximity between two items at encoding predicts the likelihood of those two items being retrieved consecutively during recall. Recent studies have found that TCE occurs under a wide variety of conditions in which strategic control processes at encoding are reduced or even eliminated.

Temporal deployment of attention in musicians: Evidence from an attentional blink paradigm.

The generalization of music training to unrelated nonmusical domains is well established and may reflect musicians' superior ability to regulate attention. We investigated the temporal deployment of attention in musicians and nonmusicians using scalp-recording of event-related potentials in an attentional blink (AB) paradigm. Participants listened to rapid sequences of stimuli and identified target and probe sounds.

Impact of on Physical and Psychosocial Outcomes.

Dance for older adults is increasingly being used to support health and well-being. While dance may be enjoyable for many, understanding its benefits for those with limited physical and cognitive abilities may provide further support for how dance may be used in these contexts. This was a study of , a dance program with remotely streamed sessions.

Generating dynamic carbon-dioxide traces from respiration-belt recordings: Feasibility using neural networks and application in functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Introduction: In the context of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), carbon dioxide (CO) is a well-known vasodilator that has been widely used to monitor and interrogate vascular physiology. Moreover, spontaneous fluctuations in end-tidal carbon dioxide (PETCO) reflects changes in arterial CO and has been demonstrated as the largest physiological noise source for denoising the low-frequency range of the resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) signal. However, the majority of rs-fMRI studies do not involve CO recordings, and most often only heart rate and respiration are recorded.