189 results match your criteria: "Institute for Human Neuroscience[Affiliation]"

The polarity of high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation affects the planning and execution of movement sequences.

Neuroimage

January 2025

Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; College of Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA; Department of Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA. Electronic address:

Noninvasive brain stimulation of the primary motor cortex has been shown to alter therapeutic outcomes in stroke and other neurological conditions, but the precise mechanisms remain poorly understood. Determining the impact of such neurostimulation on the neural processing supporting motor control is a critical step toward further harnessing its therapeutic potential in multiple neurological conditions affecting the motor system. Herein, we leverage the excellent spatio-temporal precision of magnetoencephalographic (MEG) imaging to identify the spectral, spatial, and temporal effects of high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) on the neural responses supporting motor control.

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Anterior pituitary gland volume mediates associations between adrenarche and changes in transdiagnostic symptoms in youth.

Dev Cogn Neurosci

January 2025

Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; Center for Pediatric Brain Health, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; Department of Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA.

The pituitary gland (PG) plays a central role in the production and secretion of pubertal hormones, with documented links to the increase in mental health symptoms during adolescence. Although literature has largely focused on examining whole PG volume, recent findings have demonstrated associations among pubertal hormone levels, including dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), PG subregions, and mental health symptoms during adolescence. Despite the anterior PG's role in DHEA production, studies have not yet examined potential links with transdiagnostic symptomology (i.

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Chronic cannabis use differentially modulates neural oscillations serving the manipulate versus maintain components of working memory processing.

Neurobiol Dis

January 2025

Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; Department of Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA; College of Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), Omaha, NE, USA. Electronic address:

The legalization of recreational cannabis use has expanded the availability of this psychoactive substance in the United States. Research has shown that chronic cannabis use is associated with altered working memory function, however, the brain areas and neural dynamics underlying these affects remain poorly understood. In this study, we leveraged magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate neurophysiological activity in 45 participants (22 heavy cannabis users) during a numerical WM task, whereby participants were asked to either maintain or manipulate (i.

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Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a common neurodevelopmental condition characterized by significant difficulty with language learning, comprehension, and expression. The neurocognitive bases of DLD are underspecified but are thought to be related, in part, to altered basal ganglia (BG). The BG are known to have a high level of brain iron, which contributes to myelination and dopaminergic pathways among other physiological mechanisms.

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Importance: Maternal tobacco use during pregnancy (MTDP) remains a major public health challenge. However, the complete spectrum of effects of MTDP is not fully understood.

Objectives: To examine the longitudinal associations of MTDP and children's brain morphometric subcortical volume and gray-white matter contrast (GWC) development.

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In practice, collecting auxiliary labeled data with same feature space from multiple domains is difficult. Thus, we focus on the heterogeneous transfer learning to address the problem of insufficient sample sizes in neuroimaging. Viewing subjects, time, and features as dimensions, brain activation and dynamic functional connectivity data can be treated as high-order heterogeneous data with heterogeneity arising from distinct feature space.

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Interactive effects of social media use and puberty on resting-state cortical activity and mental health symptoms.

Dev Cogn Neurosci

November 2024

Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; Center for Pediatric Brain Health, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; Department of Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA.

Adolescence is a period of profound biopsychosocial development, with pubertally-driven neural reorganization as social demands increase in peer contexts. The explosive increase in social media access has fundamentally changed peer interactions among youth, creating an urgent need to understand its impact on neurobiological development and mental health. Extant literature indicates that using social media promotes social comparison and feedback seeking (SCFS) behaviors in youth, which portend increased risk for mental health disorders, but little is known about its impact on neurobiological development.

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Article Synopsis
  • Facial expressions play a crucial role in social interactions and can influence behavior by conveying emotions, but how this ability varies between genders and is affected by anxiety is not well understood.
  • A study using fMRI involved 191 youth (ages 6 to 15) to assess how sex and anxiety impact brain responses to emotional faces, focusing on angry, happy, and neutral expressions.
  • Results showed that anxiety levels interacted with sex, where anxious girls exhibited weaker brain activation in response to happy faces, whereas anxious boys showed stronger activation, highlighting the complexity of emotional processing influenced by gender and anxiety.
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  • Research highlights age-related declines in cognitive control focused primarily on frontoparietal networks, but less is known about how this affects motor responses amid distractions.
  • A study involving 72 participants (ages 28-63) used magnetoencephalography to examine the connectivity between attention and motor networks during interference tasks.
  • Results showed age-related changes in brain connectivity, with increased beta and gamma activity linking motor and visual regions, suggesting that older adults may struggle more with competing tasks, indicating a decline in adaptive brain function.
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  • - The study examines how sensorimotor cortical dynamics in youth with cerebral palsy are linked to their motor performance errors and mobility issues, highlighting the potential for these dynamics to serve as biomarkers for therapeutic outcomes.
  • - Researchers used magnetoencephalography to measure changes in brain oscillations in both youth with cerebral palsy and neurotypical controls during a knee extension task, revealing significant practice-dependent changes in cortical activity.
  • - Results indicated that improved motor performance in youth with cerebral palsy, such as faster reaction times and more accurate target matching, correlates with stronger beta and gamma oscillations in the sensorimotor cortex, suggesting enhanced certainty in motor planning and better neural activation patterns after practice.
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  • - Pediatric obesity rates in the U.S. have greatly increased, and there are observable links between obesity and cognitive deficits, particularly in understanding how body mass impacts brain function in kids and teens.
  • - A study involving 72 youth aged 9-16 examined brain activity while they performed an abstract reasoning task using magnetoencephalography, focusing on correlations between their body mass index (zBMI) and neural responses.
  • - Results indicated that higher zBMI was associated with reduced theta brain wave activity in regions important for reasoning, which corresponded to slower reaction times, suggesting that obesity may negatively affect cognitive performance in youth.
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Oscillatory activity in bilateral prefrontal cortices is altered by distractor strength during working memory processing.

Neuroimage

November 2024

Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, 14090 Mother Teresa Lane, Boys Town, NE, 68010, USA; Department of Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Creighton University, 2500 California Plaza, Omaha, NE, 68178, USA. Electronic address:

Working memory (WM) enables the temporary storage of limited information and is a central component of higher order cognitive function. Irrelevant and/or distracting information can have a negative impact on WM processing and suppressing such incoming stimuli is critical to maintaining adequate performance. However, the neural mechanisms and dynamics underlying such distractor inhibition remain poorly understood.

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Emotion perception is essential to affective and cognitive development which involves distributed brain circuits. Emotion identification skills emerge in infancy and continue to develop throughout childhood and adolescence. Understanding the development of the brain's emotion circuitry may help us explain the emotional changes during adolescence.

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People with HIV exhibit spectrally distinct patterns of rhythmic cortical activity serving cognitive flexibility.

Neurobiol Dis

October 2024

Institute for Human Neuroscience, Boys Town National Research Hospital, Boys Town, NE, USA; College of Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), Omaha, NE, USA; Department of Pharmacology & Neuroscience, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA. Electronic address:

Despite effective antiretroviral therapy, cognitive impairment remains prevalent among people with HIV (PWH) and decrements in executive function are particularly prominent. One component of executive function is cognitive flexibility, which integrates a variety of executive functions to dynamically adapt one's behavior in response to changing contextual demands. Though substantial work has illuminated HIV-related aberrations in brain function, it remains unclear how the neural oscillatory dynamics serving cognitive flexibility are affected by HIV-related alterations in neural functioning.

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Our understanding of the neurobiology underlying cognitive dysfunction in persons with cerebral palsy is very limited, especially in the neurocognitive domain of visual selective attention. This investigation utilized magnetoencephalography and an Eriksen arrow-based flanker task to quantify the dynamics underlying selective attention in a cohort of youth and adults with cerebral palsy (n = 31; age range = 9 to 47 yr) and neurotypical controls (n = 38; age range = 11 to 49 yr). The magnetoencephalography data were transformed into the time-frequency domain to identify neural oscillatory responses and imaged using a beamforming approach.

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Verbal working memory (vWM) is an essential limited-capacity cognitive system that spans the fronto-parietal network and utilizes the subprocesses of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. With the recent widespread use of noninvasive brain stimulation techniques, multiple recent studies have examined whether such stimulation may enhance cognitive abilities such as vWM, but the findings to date remain unclear in terms of both behavior and critical brain regions. In the current study, we applied high-definition direct current stimulation to the left and right parietal cortices of 39 healthy adults in three separate sessions (left anodal, right anodal, and sham).

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Background: People who regularly use cannabis exhibit altered brain dynamics during cognitive control tasks, though the impact of regular cannabis use on the neural dynamics serving motor control remains less understood.

Aims: We sought to investigate how regular cannabis use modulates the neural dynamics serving motor control.

Methods: Thirty-four people who regularly use cannabis (cannabis+) and 33 nonusers (cannabis-) underwent structured interviews about their substance use history and performed the Eriksen flanker task to map the neural dynamics serving motor control during high-density magnetoencephalography (MEG).

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Modeling dynamic interactions among network components is crucial to uncovering the evolution mechanisms of complex networks. Recently, spatio-temporal graph learning methods have achieved noteworthy results in characterizing the dynamic changes of inter-node relations (INRs). However, challenges remain: The spatial neighborhood of an INR is underexploited, and the spatio-temporal dependencies in INRs' dynamic changes are overlooked, ignoring the influence of historical states and local information.

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Background: Cannabis is the most widely used psychoactive drug in the United States. While multiple studies have associated acute cannabis consumption with alterations in cognitive function (e.g.

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Whilst the average lifespan of persons with HIV now approximates that of the general population, these individuals are at a much higher risk of developing cognitive impairment with ∼35-70% experiencing at least subtle cognitive deficits. Previous works suggest that HIV impacts both low-level primary sensory regions and higher-level association cortices. Notably, multiple neuroHIV studies have reported elevated levels of spontaneous cortical activity during the pre-stimulus baseline period of task-based experiments, but only a few have examined such activity during resting-state conditions.

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Regular cannabis use is associated with cortex-wide changes in spontaneous and oscillatory activity, although the functional significance of such changes remains unclear. We hypothesized that regular cannabis use would suppress spontaneous gamma activity in regions serving cognitive control and scale with task performance. Participants (34 cannabis users, 33 nonusers) underwent an interview regarding their substance use history and completed the Eriksen flanker task during magnetoencephalography (MEG).

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Introduction: Despite parallel research indicating amyloid-β accumulation, alterations in cortical neurophysiological signaling, and multi-system neurotransmitter disruptions in Alzheimer's disease (AD), the relationships between these phenomena remains unclear.

Methods: Using magnetoencephalography, positron emission tomography, and an atlas of 19 neurotransmitters, we studied the alignment between neurophysiological alterations, amyloid-β deposition, and the neurochemical gradients of the cortex.

Results: In patients with mild cognitive impairment and AD, changes in cortical rhythms were topographically aligned with cholinergic, serotonergic, and dopaminergic systems.

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Visual entrainment is a powerful and widely used research tool to study visual information processing in the brain. While many entrainment studies have focused on frequencies around 14-16 Hz, there is renewed interest in understanding visual entrainment at higher frequencies (e.g.

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