Overnight changes in performance fatigability and their relationship to modulated deep sleep oscillations via auditory stimulation.

Deep sleep oscillations are proposed to be central in restoring brain function and to affect different aspects of motor performance such as facilitating the consolidation of motor sequences resulting in faster and more accurate sequence tapping. Yet, whether deep sleep modulates performance fatigability during fatiguing tasks remains unexplored. We investigated overnight changes in tapping speed and resistance against performance fatigability via a finger tapping task.

Effects of auditory sleep modulation approaches on brain oscillatory and cardiovascular dynamics.

Slow waves, the hallmark feature of deep nonrapid eye movement sleep, do potentially drive restorative effects of sleep on brain and body functions. Sleep modulation techniques to elucidate the functional role of slow waves thus have gained large interest. Auditory slow wave stimulation is a promising tool; however, directly comparing auditory stimulation approaches within a night and analyzing induced dynamic brain and cardiovascular effects are yet missing.

Comparable performance on a spatial memory task in data collected in the lab and online.

Online data collection offers a wide range of benefits including access to larger and more diverse populations, together with a reduction in the experiment cycle. Here we compare performance in a spatial memory task, in which participants had to estimate object locations following viewpoint shifts, using data from a controlled lab-based setting and from an unsupervised online sample. We found that the data collected in a conventional laboratory setting and those collected online produced very similar results, although the online data was more variable with standard errors being about 10% larger than those of the data collected in the lab.

Mental individuation of imagined finger movements can be achieved using TMS-based neurofeedback.

Neurofeedback (NF) in combination with motor imagery (MI) can be used for training individuals to volitionally modulate sensorimotor activity without producing overt movements. However, until now, NF methods were of limited utility for mentally training specific hand and finger actions. Here we employed a novel transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) based protocol to probe and detect MI-induced motor activity patterns in the primary motor cortex (M1) with the aim to reinforce selective facilitation of single finger representations.

Delay discounting, genetic sensitivity, and leukocyte telomere length.

In a graying world, there is an increasing interest in correlates of aging, especially those found in early life. Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) is an emerging marker of aging at the cellular level, but little is known regarding its link with poor decision making that often entails being overly impatient. Here we investigate the relationship between LTL and the degree of impatience, which is measured in the laboratory using an incentivized delay discounting task.