Temporal Sensitivity Measured Shortly After Cochlear Implantation Predicts 6-Month Speech Recognition Outcome.

Objectives: Psychoacoustic tests assessed shortly after cochlear implantation are useful predictors of the rehabilitative speech outcome. While largely independent, both spectral and temporal resolution tests are important to provide an accurate prediction of speech recognition. However, rapid tests of temporal sensitivity are currently lacking.

Cortical parcellation based on structural connectivity: A case for generative models.

One of the major challenges in systems neuroscience is to identify brain networks and unravel their significance for brain function -this has led to the concept of the 'connectome'. Connectomes are currently extensively studied in large-scale international efforts at multiple scales, and follow different definitions with respect to their connections as well as their elements. Perhaps the most promising avenue for defining the elements of connectomes originates from the notion that individual brain areas maintain distinct (long-range) connection profiles.

Using positron emission tomography to investigate hormone-mediated neurochemical changes across the female lifespan: implications for depression.

Ovarian hormones, particularly oestrogen and progesterone, undergo major fluctuations across the female lifespan. These hormone transition periods, such as the transition from pregnancy to postpartum, as well as the transition into menopause (perimenopause), are also known to be times of elevated susceptibility to depression. This study reviews how these transition periods likely influence neurochemical changes in the brain that result in disease vulnerability.

Gray matter structural networks are associated with cardiovascular risk factors in healthy older adults.

While recent 'big data' analyses discovered structural brain networks that alter with age and relate to cognitive decline, identifying modifiable factors that prevent these changes remains a major challenge. We therefore aimed to determine the effects of common cardiovascular risk factors on vulnerable gray matter (GM) networks in a large and well-characterized population-based cohort. In 616 healthy elderly (258 women, 60-80 years) of the LIFE-Adult-Study, we assessed the effects of obesity, smoking, blood pressure, markers of glucose and lipid metabolism as well as physical activity on major GM-networks derived using linked independent component analysis.

The dynamics of resting fluctuations in the brain: metastability and its dynamical cortical core.

In the human brain, spontaneous activity during resting state consists of rapid transitions between functional network states over time but the underlying mechanisms are not understood. We use connectome based computational brain network modeling to reveal fundamental principles of how the human brain generates large-scale activity observable by noninvasive neuroimaging. We used structural and functional neuroimaging data to construct whole- brain models.

Higher body mass index is associated with reduced posterior default mode connectivity in older adults.

Obesity is a complex neurobehavioral disorder that has been linked to changes in brain structure and function. However, the impact of obesity on functional connectivity and cognition in aging humans is largely unknown. Therefore, the association of body mass index (BMI), resting-state network connectivity, and cognitive performance in 712 healthy, well-characterized older adults of the Leipzig Research Center for Civilization Diseases (LIFE) cohort (60-80 years old, mean BMI 27.

Intensive speech and language therapy in patients with chronic aphasia after stroke: a randomised, open-label, blinded-endpoint, controlled trial in a health-care setting.

Background: Treatment guidelines for aphasia recommend intensive speech and language therapy for chronic (≥6 months) aphasia after stroke, but large-scale, class 1 randomised controlled trials on treatment effectiveness are scarce. We aimed to examine whether 3 weeks of intensive speech and language therapy under routine clinical conditions improved verbal communication in daily-life situations in people with chronic aphasia after stroke.

Methods: In this multicentre, parallel group, superiority, open-label, blinded-endpoint, randomised controlled trial, patients aged 70 years or younger with aphasia after stroke lasting for 6 months or more were recruited from 19 inpatient or outpatient rehabilitation centres in Germany.

Neuronal correlates of continuous manual tracking under varying visual movement feedback in a virtual reality environment.

To accurately guide one's actions online, the brain predicts sensory action feedback ahead of time based on internal models, which can be updated by sensory prediction errors. The underlying operations can be experimentally investigated in sensorimotor adaptation tasks, in which moving under perturbed sensory action feedback requires internal model updates. Here we altered healthy participants' visual hand movement feedback in a virtual reality setup, while assessing brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Functional connectivity alterations in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus infection: A multimodal MRI study.

Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is associated with fatigue and depression. Cognitive impairments are also reported in a smaller number of HCV-positive patients. Recent studies linked HCV to low-grade inflammation in brain.

How do parcellation size and short-range connectivity affect dynamics in large-scale brain network models?

Recent efforts to model human brain activity on the scale of the whole brain rest on connectivity estimates of large-scale networks derived from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). This type of connectivity describes white matter fiber tracts. The number of short-range cortico-cortical white-matter connections is, however, underrepresented in such large-scale brain models.

Dynamic functional connectivity reveals altered variability in functional connectivity among patients with major depressive disorder.

Resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has become a useful tool to investigate the connectivity structure of mental health disorders. In the case of major depressive disorder (MDD), recent studies regarding the RS-fMRI have found abnormal connectivity in several regions of the brain, particularly in the default mode network (DMN). Thus, the relevance of the DMN to self-referential thoughts and ruminations has made the use of the resting-state approach particularly important for MDD.

Higher body mass index in older adults is associated with lower gray matter volume: implications for memory performance.

Midlife obesity has been associated with increased dementia risk, yet reports on brain structure and function are mixed. We therefore assessed the effects of body mass index (BMI) on gray matter volume (GMV) and cognition in a well-characterized sample of community-dwelled older adults. GMV was measured using 3T-neuroimaging in 617 participants (258 women, 60-80 years, BMI 17-41 kg/m(2)).

Habenula volume increases with disease severity in unmedicated major depressive disorder as revealed by 7T MRI.

The habenula is a paired epithalamic structure involved in the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder (MDD). Evidence comes from its impact on the regulation of serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons, the role in emotional processing and studies on animal models of depression. The present study investigated habenula volumes in 20 unmedicated and 20 medicated MDD patients and 20 healthy controls for the first time by applying a triplanar segmentation algorithm on 7 Tesla magnetic resonance (MR) whole-brain T1 maps.

Neural synchrony indexes impaired motor slowing after errors and novelty following white matter damage.

In humans, action errors and perceptual novelty elicit activity in a shared frontostriatal brain network, allowing them to adapt their ongoing behavior to such unexpected action outcomes. Healthy and pathologic aging reduces the integrity of white matter pathways that connect individual hubs of such networks and can impair the associated cognitive functions. Here, we investigated whether structural disconnection within this network because of small-vessel disease impairs the neural processes that subserve motor slowing after errors and novelty (post-error slowing, PES; post-novel slowing, PNS).

The Rediscovery of Slowness: Exploring the Timing of Cognition.

Slowness of thought is not necessarily a handicap but could be a signature of optimal brain function. Emerging evidence shows that neuroanatomical and dynamical constraints of the human brain shape its functionality in optimal ways, characterized by slowness during task-based cognition in the context of spontaneous resting-state activity. This activity can be described mechanistically by whole-brain computational modeling that relates directly to optimality in the context of theories arguing for metastability in the brain.

Language specific listening of Japanese geminate consonants: a cross-linguistic study.

Various aspects of linguistic experience influence the way we segment, represent, and process speech signals. The Japanese phonetic and orthographic systems represent geminate consonants (double consonants, e.g.

Bringing back the body into the mind: gestures enhance word learning in foreign language.

Foreign language education in the twenty-first century still teaches vocabulary mainly through reading and listening activities. This is due to the link between teaching practice and traditional philosophy of language, where language is considered to be an abstract phenomenon of the mind. However, a number of studies have shown that accompanying words or phrases of a foreign language with gestures leads to better memory results.

Meeting the brain on its own terms.

In contemporary human brain mapping, it is commonly assumed that the "mind is what the brain does". Based on that assumption, task-based imaging studies of the last three decades measured differences in brain activity that are thought to reflect the exercise of human mental capacities (e.g.

When Action Observation Facilitates Visual Perception: Activation in Visuo-Motor Areas Contributes to Object Recognition.

Recent evidence suggests an interaction between the ventral visual-perceptual and dorsal visuo-motor brain systems during the course of object recognition. However, the precise function of the dorsal stream for perception remains to be determined. The present study specified the functional contribution of the visuo-motor system to visual object recognition using functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potential (ERP) during action priming.

Dissecting psychiatric spectrum disorders by generative embedding.

This proof-of-concept study examines the feasibility of defining subgroups in psychiatric spectrum disorders by generative embedding, using dynamical system models which infer neuronal circuit mechanisms from neuroimaging data. To this end, we re-analysed an fMRI dataset of 41 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and 42 healthy controls performing a numerical n-back working-memory task. In our generative-embedding approach, we used parameter estimates from a dynamic causal model (DCM) of a visual-parietal-prefrontal network to define a model-based feature space for the subsequent application of supervised and unsupervised learning techniques.

Lesions to the prefrontal performance-monitoring network disrupt neural processing and adaptive behaviors after both errors and novelty.

Unexpected events can have internal causes (action errors) as well as external causes (perceptual novelty). Both events call for adaptations of ongoing behavior, resulting, amongst other things, in post-error and post-novelty slowing (PES/PNS) of reaction times (RT). Both types of events are processed in prefrontal brain areas, indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs): Errors are followed by a complex of ERPs comprised of the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe), whereas novels are followed by a N2/P3 complex.

Making data sharing count: a publication-based solution.

The neuroimaging community has been increasingly called up to openly share data. Although data sharing has been a cornerstone of large-scale data consortia, the incentive for the individual researcher remains unclear. Other fields have benefited from embracing a data publication form - the data paper - that allows researchers to publish their datasets as a citable scientific publication.

The fuzzy brain. Vagueness and mapping connectivity of the human cerebral cortex.

While the past century of neuroscientific research has brought considerable progress in defining the boundaries of the human cerebral cortex, there are cases in which the demarcation of one area from another remains fuzzy. Despite the existence of clearly demarcated areas, examples of gradual transitions between areas are known since early cytoarchitectonic studies. Since multi-modal anatomical approaches and functional connectivity studies brought renewed attention to the topic, a better understanding of the theoretical and methodological implications of fuzzy boundaries in brain science can be conceptually useful.

From acoustic segmentation to language processing: evidence from optical imaging.

During language acquisition in infancy and when learning a foreign language, the segmentation of the auditory stream into words and phrases is a complex process. Intuitively, learners use "anchors" to segment the acoustic speech stream into meaningful units like words and phrases. Regularities on a segmental (e.