174 results match your criteria: "Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UNITN[Affiliation]"
Int J Mol Sci
June 2024
Unit of Cell and Developmental Biology, Department of Biology, University of Pisa, 56127 Pisa, Italy.
Physiology and behavior are structured temporally to anticipate daily cycles of light and dark, ensuring fitness and survival. Neuromodulatory systems in the brain-including those involving serotonin and dopamine-exhibit daily oscillations in neural activity and help shape circadian rhythms. Disrupted neuromodulation can cause circadian abnormalities that are thought to underlie several neuropsychiatric disorders, including bipolar mania and schizophrenia, for which a mechanistic understanding is still lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
June 2024
Autism Center of Excellence, Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92037, USA.
Language and social symptoms improve with age in some autistic toddlers, but not in others, and such outcome differences are not clearly predictable from clinical scores alone. Here we aim to identify early-age brain alterations in autism that are prognostic of future language ability. Leveraging 372 longitudinal structural MRI scans from 166 autistic toddlers and 109 typical toddlers and controlling for brain size, we find that, compared to typical toddlers, autistic toddlers show differentially larger or thicker temporal and fusiform regions; smaller or thinner inferior frontal lobe and midline structures; larger callosal subregion volume; and smaller cerebellum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Biol Rep
June 2024
Neuroscience Institute, National Research Council (CNR), Pisa, Italy.
Life (Basel)
April 2024
Precision Neuroscience and Neuromodulation Program, Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Investigating the biophysiological substrates of psychiatric illnesses is of great interest to our understanding of disorders' etiology, the identification of reliable biomarkers, and potential new therapeutic avenues. Schizophrenia represents a consolidated model of γ alterations arising from the aberrant activity of parvalbumin-positive GABAergic interneurons, whose dysfunction is associated with perineuronal net impairment and neuroinflammation. This model of pathogenesis is supported by molecular, cellular, and functional evidence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFbioRxiv
April 2024
Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Rovereto, Italy.
Chromosome 22q11.2 deletion is among the strongest known genetic risk factors for neuropsychiatric disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Brain imaging studies have reported disrupted large-scale functional connectivity in people with 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Biol
May 2024
Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Piazzale S. Agostino 2, Bergamo 24129, Italy. Electronic address:
The posterior cerebellum is a recently discovered hub of the affective and social brain, with different subsectors contributing to different social functions. However, very little is known about when the posterior cerebellum plays a critical role in social processing. Due to its location and anatomy, it has been difficult to use traditional approaches to directly study the chronometry of the cerebellum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Behav Immun
May 2024
School of Pharmacy, Pharmacology Unit, Center for Neuroscience, University of Camerino, Camerino, Italy.
In opioid use disorder (OUD) patients, a decrease in brain grey matter volume (GMV) has been reported. It is unclear whether this is the consequence of prolonged exposure to opioids or is a predisposing causal factor in OUD development. To investigate this, we conducted a structural MRI longitudinal study in NIH Heterogeneous Stock rats exposed to heroin self-administration and age-matched naïve controls housed in the same controlled environment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Chem Neurosci
April 2024
Department of Biology, Unit of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Pisa, Pisa 56127, Italy.
Serotonin-releasing fibers depart from the raphe nuclei to profusely innervate the entire central nervous system, displaying in some brain regions high structural plasticity in response to genetically induced abrogation of serotonin synthesis. Chronic fluoxetine treatment used as a tool to model peri-physiological, clinically relevant serotonin elevation is also able to cause structural rearrangements of the serotonergic fibers innervating the hippocampus. Whether this effect is limited to hippocampal-innervating fibers or extends to other populations of axons is not known.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
February 2024
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padua, Italy.
Exploring how the emergent functional connectivity (FC) relates to the underlying anatomy (structural connectivity, SC) is one of the major goals of modern neuroscience. At the macroscale level, no one-to-one correspondence between structural and functional links seems to exist. And we posit that to better understand their coupling, two key aspects should be considered: the directionality of the structural connectome and limitations in explaining networks functions through an undirected measure such as FC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Cogn Neurosci
February 2024
Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
The ongoing reproducibility crisis in psychology and cognitive neuroscience has sparked increasing calls to re-evaluate and reshape scientific culture and practices. Heeding those calls, we have recently launched the EEGManyPipelines project as a means to assess the robustness of EEG research in naturalistic conditions and experiment with an alternative model of conducting scientific research. One hundred sixty-eight analyst teams, encompassing 396 individual researchers from 37 countries, independently analyzed the same unpublished, representative EEG data set to test the same set of predefined hypotheses and then provided their analysis pipelines and reported outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Chem Neurosci
December 2023
Unit of Cell and Developmental Biology, Department of Biology, University of Pisa, 56127 Pisa, Italy.
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in the modulation of a multitude of physiological and behavioral processes. In spite of the relatively reduced number of serotonin-producing neurons present in the mammalian CNS, a complex long-range projection system provides profuse innervation to the whole brain. Heterogeneity of serotonin receptors, grouped in seven families, and their spatiotemporal expression pattern account for its widespread impact.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCell Rep
November 2023
Lifespan Brain Institute, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Human brain size changes dynamically through early development, peaks in adolescence, and varies up to 2-fold among adults. However, the molecular genetic underpinnings of interindividual variation in brain size remain unknown. Here, we leveraged postmortem brain RNA sequencing and measurements of brain weight (BW) in 2,531 individuals across three independent datasets to identify 928 genome-wide significant associations with BW.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Neurosci
September 2023
Department of Neurology, Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
Cereb Cortex
October 2023
Epigenetics & Neurobiology Unit, EMBL Rome, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Via Ramarini 32, 00015 Monterotondo, Italy.
bioRxiv
August 2023
Integrated Program in Neuroscience, McGill University.
Autism presents with significant phenotypic and neuroanatomical heterogeneity, and neuroimaging studies of the thalamus, globus pallidus and striatum in autism have produced inconsistent and contradictory results. These structures are critical mediators of functions known to be atypical in autism, including sensory gating and motor function. We examined both volumetric and fine-grained localized shape differences in autism using a large (=3145, 1045-1318 after strict quality control), cross-sectional dataset of T1-weighted structural MRI scans from 32 sites, including both males and females (assigned-at-birth).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElife
September 2023
Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @ UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
The idea that sensory stimulation to the embryo (in utero or in ovo) may be crucial for brain development is widespread. Unfortunately, up to now evidence was only indirect because mapping of embryonic brain activity in vivo is challenging. Here, we applied for the first time manganese enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MEMRI), a functional imaging method, to the eggs of domestic chicks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerspect Psychol Sci
November 2024
Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany.
Social neuroscience has often been criticized for approaching the investigation of the neural processes that enable social interaction and cognition from a passive, detached, third-person perspective, without involving any real-time social interaction. With the emergence of , investigators have uncovered the unique complexity of neural-activation patterns in actual, real-time interaction. Social cognition that occurs during social interaction is fundamentally different from that unfolding during social observation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEMBO J
July 2023
Epigenetics and Neurobiology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Monterotondo, Italy.
The mature mammalian brain connectome emerges during development via the extension and pruning of neuronal connections. Glial cells have been identified as key players in the phagocytic elimination of neuronal synapses and projections. Recently, phosphatidylserine has been identified as neuronal "eat-me" signal that guides elimination of unnecessary input sources, but the associated transduction systems involved in such pruning are yet to be described.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Stimul
June 2023
Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems@UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Corso Bettini 31, 38068, Rovereto (TN), Italy; Department of Neurology, Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02215, USA; Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 01238, USA. Electronic address:
Background: Attention optimizes the selection of visual information, while suppressing irrelevant visual input through cortical mechanisms that are still unclear. We set to investigate these processes using an attention task with an embedded to-be-ignored interfering visual input.
Objective: We delivered electrical stimulation to attention-related brain areas to modulate these facilitatory/inhibitory attentional mechanisms.
Mol Psychiatry
May 2023
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Frankfurt, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Mol Autism
March 2023
Autism Center of Excellence, Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92037, USA.
Background: Social and language abilities are closely intertwined during early typical development. In autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, deficits in social and language development are early-age core symptoms. We previously reported that superior temporal cortex, a well-established social and language region, shows reduced activation to social affective speech in ASD toddlers; however, the atypical cortical connectivity that accompanies this deviance remains unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFbioRxiv
February 2023
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
How the emergent functional connectivity (FC) relates to the underlying anatomy (structural connectivity, SC) is one of the biggest questions of modern neuroscience. At the macro-scale level, no one-to-one correspondence between structural and functional links seems to exist. And we posit that to better understand their coupling, two key aspects should be taken into account: the directionality of the structural connectome and the limitations of describing network functions in terms of FC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBr J Psychiatry
March 2023
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany; Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychiatric University Hospital, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Brain Stimul
December 2022
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems@UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy; Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation and Department of Neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has shown potential as an effective aid to facilitate learning. A popular application of this technology has been in combination with working memory training (WMT) in order to enhance transfer effects to other cognitive measures after training.
Objective: This meta-analytic review aims to synthesize the existing literature on tDCS-enhanced WMT to quantify the extent to which tDCS can improve performance on transfer tasks after training.
Am J Psychiatry
January 2023
Methods of Plasticity Research, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich (Floris); Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, and Department for Cognitive Neuroscience, Radboud University Medical Center Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (Floris, Mennes, Llera, van Rooij, Oldehinkel, Forde, Marquand, Buitelaar, Beckmann); Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (Peng, Gong, Beckmann), and Visual Geometry Group (Peng), University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K.; Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. (Warrier, Tsompanidis, Holt, Lai, Baron-Cohen); Laboratory for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy (Lombardo); Department of Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences (Pretzsch, Ecker, Dell'Acqua, Loth, Murphy), Department of Psychology (Charman), Sackler Institute for Translational Neurodevelopment (Dell'Acqua, Loth, Murphy), and Department of Neuroimaging (Marquand), Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, King's College London; Institut Pasteur, Human Genetics and Cognitive Functions Unity, IUF, Université Paris Cité, Paris (Moreau, Bourgeron); Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, Neuroscience and Rare Diseases, Roche Innovation Center Basel, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Basel, Switzerland (Tillmann); Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Banaschewski) and Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (Moessnang), Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany; Department of Applied Psychology, SRH University, Heidelberg, Germany (Moessnang); Department of Psychiatry, Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands (Durston); Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University Hospital, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (Ecker); Margaret and Wallace McCain Centre for Child, Youth, and Family Mental Health and Azrieli Adult Neurodevelopmental Centre, Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto (Lai); Department of Psychiatry and Autism Research Unit, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto (Lai); Department of Psychiatry, Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto (Lai); Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Medicine, Taipei (Lai); Karakter Child and Adolescent Psychiatry University Centre, Nijmegen, the Netherlands (Buitelaar).
Objective: The male preponderance in prevalence of autism is among the most pronounced sex ratios across neurodevelopmental conditions. The authors sought to elucidate the relationship between autism and typical sex-differential neuroanatomy, cognition, and related gene expression.
Methods: Using a novel deep learning framework trained to predict biological sex based on T-weighted structural brain images, the authors compared sex prediction model performance across neurotypical and autistic males and females.