Modulation of sleep using electrical vestibular nerve stimulation prior to sleep onset: a pilot study.

Objectives: Electrical stimulation of the vestibular system (VeNS) has been shown to improve Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) when delivered during sleep. We hypothesize that repeated electrical vestibular stimulation, when delivered prior to sleep onset, will improve ISI scores. The primary aim of this study was to assess the effect that VeNS had on ISI scores when delivered prior to sleep onset.

Visual-reward driven changes of movement during action execution.

Motor decision-making is often described as a sequential process, beginning with the assessment of available options and leading to the execution of a selected movement. While this view is likely to be accurate for decisions requiring significant deliberation, it would seem unfit for choices between movements in dynamic environments. In this study, we examined whether and how non-selected motor options may be considered post-movement onset.

Voluntary Language Switching in the Context of Bilingual Aphasia.

As studies of bilingual language control (BLC) seek to explore the underpinnings of bilinguals' abilities to juggle two languages, different types of language switching tasks have been used to uncover switching and mixing effects and thereby reveal what proactive and reactive control mechanisms are involved in language switching. Voluntary language switching tasks, where a bilingual participant can switch freely between their languages while naming, are being utilized more often due to their greater ecological validity compared to cued switching paradigms. Because this type of task had not yet been applied to language switching in bilingual patients, our study sought to explore voluntary switching in bilinguals with aphasia (BWAs) as well as in healthy bilinguals.

Statistical learning in domestic chicks is modulated by strain and sex.

Statistical learning is a key mechanism for detecting regularities from a variety of sensory inputs. Precocial newborn domestic chicks provide an excellent model for (1) exploring unsupervised forms of statistical learning in a comparative perspective, and (2) elucidating the ecological function of statistical learning using imprinting procedures. Here we investigated the role of the sex of the chicks in modulating the direction of preference (for familiarity or novelty) in a visual statistical learning task already employed with chicks and human infants.

Polygenic risk for ADHD and ASD and their relation with cognitive measures in school children.

Background: Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are child-onset neurodevelopmental disorders frequently accompanied by cognitive difficulties. In the current study, we aim to examine the genetic overlap between ADHD and ASD and cognitive measures of working memory (WM) and attention performance among schoolchildren using a polygenic risk approach.

Methods: A total of 1667 children from a population-based cohort aged 7-11 years with data available on genetics and cognition were included in the analyses.

Brain States and Transitions: Insights from Computational Neuroscience.

Within the field of computational neuroscience there are great expectations of finding new ways to rebalance the complex dynamic system of the human brain through controlled pharmacological or electromagnetic perturbation. Yet many obstacles remain between the ability to accurately predict how and where best to perturb to force a transition from one brain state to another. The foremost challenge is a commonly agreed definition of a given brain state.

Heuristics and optimal solutions to the breadth-depth dilemma.

In multialternative risky choice, we are often faced with the opportunity to allocate our limited information-gathering capacity between several options before receiving feedback. In such cases, we face a natural trade-off between breadth-spreading our capacity across many options-and depthgaining more information about a smaller number of options. Despite its broad relevance to daily life, including in many naturalistic foraging situations, the optimal strategy in the breadth-depth trade-off has not been delineated.

Can the occipital alpha-phase speed up visual detection through a real-time EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI)?

Electrical brain oscillations reflect fluctuations in neural excitability. Fluctuations in the alpha band (α, 8-12 Hz) in the occipito-parietal cortex are thought to regulate sensory responses, leading to cyclic variations in visual perception. Inspired by this theory, some past and recent studies have addressed the relationship between α-phase from extra-cranial EEG and behavioural responses to visual stimuli in humans.

Two-year-old children's processing of two-word sequences occurring 19 or more times per million and their influence on subsequent word learning.

We know that 8-month-old infants track the statistical properties of a series of syllables and that 2- and 3-year-old children process familiar phrases more efficiently than unfamiliar phrases, but less is known about the intermediary level of two-word sequences. In Study 1, 2-year-olds (N = 45, mean age = 651 days) heard two-word sequences consisting of a prime word followed by a noun, with two pictures appearing on the screen (depicting the noun and a distractor). Eye tracking showed that children looked more quickly at the noun picture for two-word sequences occurring an average of 19 times per million and 206 times per million in child-directed speech than for novel sequences.

Semantic interference is not modality specific: Evidence from sound naming with distractor pictures.

In three experiments, participants named environmental sounds (e.g., the bleating of a sheep by producing the word "sheep") in the presence of distractor pictures.

Author Correction: Response outcomes gate the impact of expectations on perceptual decisions.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Representation of foreseeable choice outcomes in orbitofrontal cortex triplet-wise interactions.

Shared neuronal variability has been shown to modulate cognitive processing. However, the relationship between shared variability and behavioral performance is heterogeneous and complex in frontal areas such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Mounting evidence shows that single-units in OFC encode a detailed cognitive map of task-space events, but the existence of a robust neuronal ensemble coding for the predictability of choice outcome is less established.

Propagation of BOLD Activity Reveals Task-dependent Directed Interactions Across Human Visual Cortex.

It has recently been shown that large-scale propagation of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity is constrained by anatomical connections and reflects transitions between behavioral states. It remains to be seen, however, if the propagation of BOLD activity can also relate to the brain's anatomical structure at a more local scale. Here, we hypothesized that BOLD propagation reflects structured neuronal activity across early visual field maps.

Active bilingualism delays the onset of mild cognitive impairment.

Lifelong bilingualism may contribute to cognitive reserve (CR) in neurodegenerative diseases as shown by a delay of the age at symptom onset in bilinguals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). However, some studies have failed to show this bilingual advantage, suggesting that it might depend on the type and degree of bilingualism. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that active bilingualism, defined as the continuous use of the two languages as opposed to second language exposition only, may protect against cognitive decline.

Model-based whole-brain effective connectivity to study distributed cognition in health and disease.

Neuroimaging techniques are now widely used to study human cognition. The functional associations between brain areas have become a standard proxy to describe how cognitive processes are distributed across the brain network. Among the many analysis tools available, dynamic models of brain activity have been developed to overcome the limitations of original connectivity measures such as functional connectivity.

Reduced spatiotemporal brain dynamics are associated with increased depressive symptoms after a relationship breakup.

Depressive symptoms following a stressful life event, such as a relationship breakup, are common, and constitute a potent risk factor for the onset of a major depressive episode. Resting-state neuroimaging studies have increasingly identified abnormal whole-brain communication in patients with depression, but it is currently unclear whether depressive symptoms in individuals without a clinical diagnosis have reliable neural underpinnings. We investigated to what extent the severity of depressive symptoms in a non-clinical sample was associated with imbalances in the complex dynamics of the brain during rest.

Opening or closing eyes at rest modulates the functional connectivity of V1 with default and salience networks.

Current evidence suggests that volitional opening or closing of the eyes modulates brain activity and connectivity. However, how the eye state influences the functional connectivity of the primary visual cortex has been poorly investigated. Using the same scanner, fMRI data from two groups of participants similar in age, sex and educational level were acquired.

From cognitive control to visual incongruity: Conflict detection in surrealistic images.

This study explored brain responses to images that exploit incongruity as a creative technique, often used in advertising (i.e., surrealistic images).

Language background shapes third-party communication expectations in 14-month-old infants.

Infants expect native and non-native speech to communicate, i.e. to transfer information between third-parties.

The Aging Imageomics Study: rationale, design and baseline characteristics of the study population.

Biomarkers of aging are urgently needed to identify individuals at high risk of developing age-associated disease or disability. Growing evidence from population-based studies points to whole-body magnetic resonance imaging's (MRI) enormous potential for quantifying subclinical disease burden and for assessing changes that occur with aging in all organ systems. The Aging Imageomics Study aims to identify biomarkers of human aging by analyzing imaging, biopsychosocial, cardiovascular, metabolomic, lipidomic, and microbiome variables.

Enhanced memory for negative social information in borderline personality disorder.

Biased social cognition toward an enhanced processing of negative social information might contribute to instability in interpersonal relationships. Such interpersonal dysfunctions are important for the understanding of several mental disorders, among them borderline personality disorder (BPD). To experimentally test enhanced memory retrieval of negative social information, using a newly developed variant of a looking-at-nothing paradigm, 45 BPD patients and 36 healthy women learned positive and negative personality traits of different target persons.

Human brain connectivity: Clinical applications for clinical neurophysiology.

This manuscript is the second part of a two-part description of the current status of understanding of the network function of the brain in health and disease. We start with the concept that brain function can be understood only by understanding its networks, how and why information flows in the brain. The first manuscript dealt with methods for network analysis, and the current manuscript focuses on the use of these methods to understand a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Ghost Attractors in Spontaneous Brain Activity: Recurrent Excursions Into Functionally-Relevant BOLD Phase-Locking States.

Functionally relevant network patterns form transiently in brain activity during rest, where a given subset of brain areas exhibits temporally synchronized BOLD signals. To adequately assess the biophysical mechanisms governing intrinsic brain activity, a detailed characterization of the dynamical features of functional networks is needed from the experimental side to constrain theoretical models. In this work, we use an open-source fMRI dataset from 100 healthy participants from the Human Connectome Project and analyze whole-brain activity using Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis (LEiDA), which serves to characterize brain activity at each time point by its whole-brain BOLD phase-locking pattern.

Individual Differences in Hippocampal Volume as a Function of BMI and Reward Sensitivity.

Sensitivity to reward is a personality trait that predisposes a person to several addictive behaviors, including the presence of different risky behaviors that facilitates uncontrolled eating. However, the multifactorial nature of obesity blurs a direct relationship between the two factors. Here, we studied the brain anatomic correlates of the interaction between reward sensitivity and body mass index (BMI) to investigate whether the coexistence of high BMI and high reward sensitivity structurally alters brain areas specifically involved in the regulation of eating behavior.