Exploring "psychic transparency" during pregnancy: a mixed-methods approach.

Background: Psychic transparency is described as a psychic crisis occurring during pregnancy. The objective was to test if it was clinically detectable.

Methods: Seven primiparous and seven nulliparous subjects were recorded during 5 min of spontaneous speech about their dreams.

Defining the spectrum of frontotemporal dementias associated with TARDBP mutations.

Objectives: We describe the largest series of patients with TARDBP mutations presenting with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and review the cases in the literature to precisely characterize FTD diseases associated with this genotype.

Methods: The phenotypic characteristics of 29 TARDBP patients, including 10 new French and Dutch cases and 19 reviewed from the literature, were evaluated.

Results: The most frequent phenotype was a behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), but a significant proportion (40%) of our patients had semantic (svFTD) or nonfluent variants (nfvFTD) at onset; and svFTD was significantly more frequent in TARDBP carriers than in other FTD genotypes (p < 0.

Cognitive procedural learning in early Alzheimer's disease: impaired processes and compensatory mechanisms.

Introduction: The aim of this study was to study cognitive procedural learning in early Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: Cognitive procedural learning was assessed using the Tower of Hanoi (TH) task. In order to take account of possible interactions between different systems during cognitive procedural learning, we also measured non-verbal intellectual functions, working memory, and declarative memory.

What happens to personal identity when semantic knowledge degrades? A study of the self and autobiographical memory in semantic dementia.

While the self has been extensively explored in amnesic patients with severe episodic but not semantic memory disturbance, little is known about the self in semantic dementia (SD), which generally features the reverse pattern of impairment. In the present study, we investigated the structural (self-representations) and functional (consciousness) dimensions of the self in a group of eight SD patients in the early to moderate stages of the disease. We used two original tasks designed to probe both structural characteristics, namely the strength and the certainty of self-concept and the episodic/semantic nature of self-representations, and functional characteristics, namely autonoetic/noetic level of consciousness, self-evaluation and self-projection into the past, present and future.

Which SPM method should be used to extract hippocampal measures in early Alzheimer's disease?

Background And Purpose: To provide guidance regarding the most appropriate voxel-based morphometry (VBM)-derived method for assessing hippocampal atrophy in early Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: T1-MRI volume data were collected in 23 patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and 18 controls. Three types of data (unmodulated and 2 types of modulated MRI) and 2 extraction methods (with reference to the hippocampal peak of atrophy identified from a preliminary whole-brain analysis, or using a template region of interest-ROI-approach) were compared to the gold-standard individual ROI (ROI-i) method through 2 statistical approaches (ANOVA and Pearson's R).

Distinct and shared cognitive functions mediate event- and time-based prospective memory impairment in normal ageing.

Prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an action at a specific point in the future. Regarded as multidimensional, PM involves several cognitive functions that are known to be impaired in normal ageing. In the present study we set out to investigate the cognitive correlates of PM impairment in normal ageing.

[Neuroimaging Alzheimer's disease: early diagnosis, monitoring, and mechanism understanding].

Neuroimaging offers a promising tool for the priority goals of current researches in Alzheimer's disease (AD) including early diagnosis, monitoring the progression of the disease and understanding the underlying mechanisms. The brain profiles of atrophy and hypometabolism associated with AD are well known and they can be used as support for early diagnosis, although the accuracy of each of these biomarkers on its own is not sufficient. An increasing number of studies highlights the relevance of disconnection processes in the development and progression of AD.

Influence of patients' emotional state on the recovery processes after a transient global amnesia.

Introduction: Currently, there is no consensus on the delay necessary to a complete recovery after a transient global amnesia (TGA). However, it seems that slight episodic memory disorders extend beyond 24h. Although this impairment is probably a consequence of the TGA attack, other factors such as patients' emotional state can intervene in the slow recovery process.

Mental time travel into the past and the future in healthy aged adults: an fMRI study.

Remembering the past and envisioning the future rely on episodic memory which enables mental time travel. Studies in young adults indicate that past and future thinking share common cognitive and neural underpinnings. No imaging data is yet available in healthy aged subjects.

When music and long-term memory interact: effects of musical expertise on functional and structural plasticity in the hippocampus.

The development of musical skills by musicians results in specific structural and functional modifications in the brain. Surprisingly, no functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study has investigated the impact of musical training on brain function during long-term memory retrieval, a faculty particularly important in music. Thus, using fMRI, we examined for the first time this process during a musical familiarity task (i.

From hysteria and shell shock to posttraumatic stress disorder: comments on psychoanalytic and neuropsychological approaches.

In this paper, we look back at some of the earliest psychoanalytic approaches to trauma. The theoretical feasibility of reconciling psychoanalytic and neurobiological accounts of the effects of severe stress is examined. First, several epistemic considerations about the concepts of falsifiability and complexity in science are discussed with regard to neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

Adolescent brain development, risk-taking and vulnerability to addiction.

Adolescents (12-18 years old) and young adults (18-25 years old), are more likely than older adults to drive-or agree to be driven-recklessly or while intoxicated, to use illicit or dangerous substances and to engage in both minor and more serious antisocial behaviour. Numerous factors during adolescence may lead to or favour initiation of drug use, such as sensation-seeking, gregariousness and social conformity. These aspects, however, cannot be dissociated from the increased sex drive and quest for an integrated self.

Sequential relationships between grey matter and white matter atrophy and brain metabolic abnormalities in early Alzheimer's disease.

Hippocampal atrophy, posterior cingulate and frontal glucose hypometabolism, and white-matter tract disruption are well described early macroscopic events in Alzheimer's disease. The relationships between these three types of alterations have been documented in previous studies, but their chronology still remains to be established. The present study used multi-modal fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging longitudinal data to address this question in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

The neural substrates of musical memory revealed by fMRI and two semantic tasks.

Recognizing a musical excerpt without necessarily retrieving its title typically reflects the existence of a memory system dedicated to the retrieval of musical knowledge. The functional distinction between musical and verbal semantic memory has seldom been investigated. In this fMRI study, we directly compared the musical and verbal memory of 20 nonmusicians, using a congruence task involving automatic semantic retrieval and a familiarity task requiring more thorough semantic retrieval.

[Sleep and episodic memory: a review of the literature in young healthy subjects and potential links between sleep changes and memory impairment observed during aging and Alzheimer's disease].

Introduction: A large body of evidence indicates that sleep favors memory consolidation.

State Of The Art: This process would occur, mainly during slow-wave sleep, by means of a dialogue between the hippocampus and neocortical areas. Low levels of acetylcholine and cortisol are also needed to favor the transfer of memory traces toward the neocortex, where they will be stored for the long-term.

A simple way to improve anatomical mapping of functional brain imaging.

Background And Purpose: Advances in functional neuroimaging studies have led to the need for improved anatomical precision to face with more and more specific challenges. Nevertheless, functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (fMRI) suffers from geometrical distortions, which limit the matching between functional and anatomical data necessary to interpret fMRI results. The "FieldMap" method is the most widely used technique to correct for geometrical distortions but in some cases cannot be applied or provides unsatisfactory results.

Is neocortical-hippocampal connectivity a better predictor of subsequent recollection than local increases in hippocampal activity? New insights on the role of priming.

During memory encoding, increased hippocampal activity-thought to reflect the binding of different types of information into unique episodes-has been shown to correlate with subsequent recollection of those episodes. Repetition priming-thought to induce more efficient perceptual processing of stimuli-is normally associated with decreased neocortical activity and is often assumed to reduce encoding into episodic memory. Here, we used fMRI to compare activity to primed and unprimed auditory words in the presence of distracting sounds as a function of whether participants subsequently recollected the word-sound associations or only had a feeling of familiarity with the word in a subsequent surprise recognition task.

When the zebra loses its stripes: Semantic priming in early Alzheimer's disease and semantic dementia.

Patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) or semantic dementia (SD) both exhibit deficits on explicit tasks of semantic memory. Semantic priming (SP) paradigms provide a very pure and precise implicit measurement of semantic memory impairment, and a previous study of AD (Giffard et al., 2002) using one such paradigm revealed that AD patients in the initial stages of semantic deterioration presented an abnormally large priming effect (hyperpriming) in a category-coordinate condition, compared with controls.

Morphological and glucose metabolism abnormalities in alcoholic Korsakoff's syndrome: group comparisons and individual analyses.

Background: Gray matter volume studies have been limited to few brain regions of interest, and white matter and glucose metabolism have received limited research attention in Korsakoff's syndrome (KS). Because of the lack of brain biomarkers, KS was found to be underdiagnosed in postmortem studies.

Methodology/principal Findings: Nine consecutively selected patients with KS and 22 matched controls underwent both structural magnetic resonance imaging and (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography examinations.

Musical and verbal semantic memory: two distinct neural networks?

Semantic memory has been investigated in numerous neuroimaging and clinical studies, most of which have used verbal or visual, but only very seldom, musical material. Clinical studies have suggested that there is a relative neural independence between verbal and musical semantic memory. In the present study, "musical semantic memory" is defined as memory for "well-known" melodies without any knowledge of the spatial or temporal circumstances of learning, while "verbal semantic memory" corresponds to general knowledge about concepts, again without any knowledge of the spatial or temporal circumstances of learning.

Neural correlates underlying musical semantic memory.

Numerous functional imaging studies have examined the neural basis of semantic memory mainly using verbal and visuospatial materials. Musical material also allows an original way to explore semantic memory processes. We used PET imaging to determine the neural substrates that underlie musical semantic memory using different tasks and stimuli.

The advantage of errorless learning for the acquisition of new concepts' labels in alcoholics.

Background: Previous findings revealed that the acquisition of new semantic concepts' labels was impaired in uncomplicated alcoholic patients. The use of errorless learning may therefore allow them to improve learning performance. However, the flexibility of the new knowledge and the memory processes involved in errorless learning remain unclear.

Longitudinal brain metabolic changes from amnestic mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease.

A sensitive marker for monitoring progression of early Alzheimer's disease would help to develop and test new therapeutic strategies. The present study is aimed at investigating brain metabolism changes over time, as a potential monitoring marker, in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment, according to their clinical outcome (converters or non-converters), and in relation to their cognitive decline. Seventeen amnestic mild cognitive impairment patients underwent magnetic resonance imaging and 18FDG-positron emission tomography scans both at inclusion and 18 months later.

The underlying mechanisms of verbal fluency deficit in frontotemporal dementia and semantic dementia.

Verbal fluency tasks are commonly used to explore semantic memory and executive functions. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying verbal fluency impairment in the frontal variant of frontotemporal dementia (fv-FTD) and in semantic dementia (SD). Semantic and phonemic fluency tasks were performed by 36 fv-FTD and SD patients and 18 elderly controls.