Do sensorimotor insoles improve gait safety in patients with Parkinson's disease on a short scale?

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) often leads to gait abnormalities, increasing the risk of falls and affecting daily life. Sensorimotor insoles aim to enhance foot sensitivity, potentially improving gait stability.

Methods: This study examined whether there are short-term effects of sensorimotor insoles on neural activation (measured by EEG), kinematic gait parameters (speed, cadence, step length, and step-length variability), and subjective gait stability in PD patients.

Transsaccadic perception of changes in object regularity.

The visual system compensates for differences between peripheral and foveal vision using different mechanisms. Although peripheral vision is characterized by higher spatial uncertainty and lower resolution than foveal vision, observers reported objects to be less distorted and less blurry in the periphery than the fovea in a visual matching task during fixation (Valsecchi et al., 2018).

A deep brain stimulation-conditioned RF coil for 3T MRI.

Purpose: To develop and test an MRI coil assembly for imaging deep brain stimulation (DBS) at 3 T with a reduced level of local specific absorption rate of RF fields near the implant.

Methods: A mechanical rotatable linearly polarized birdcage transmitter outfitted with a 32-channel receive array was constructed. The coil performance and image quality were systematically evaluated using bench-level measurements and imaging performance tests, including SNR maps, array element noise correlation, and acceleration capabilities.

A psychophysical evaluation of techniques for Mooney image generation.

Mooney images can contribute to our understanding of the processes involved in visual perception, because they allow a dissociation between image content and image understanding. Mooney images are generated by first smoothing and subsequently thresholding an image. In most previous studies this was performed manually, using subjective criteria for generation.

White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity, and category-selectivity from birth.

Category-selective regions in ventral temporal cortex (VTC) have a consistent anatomical organization, which is hypothesized to be scaffolded by white matter connections. However, it is unknown how white matter connections are organized from birth. Here, we scanned newborn to 6-month-old infants and adults and used a data-driven approach to determine the organization of the white matter connections of VTC.

Estimating the human bottleneck for contact tracing.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the importance of contact tracing for epidemiological mitigation. Contact tracing interviews (CTIs) typically rely on episodic memory, which is prone to decline over time. Here, we provide a quantitative estimate of reporting decline for age- and gender-representative samples from the United Kingdom and Germany, emulating >15,000 CTIs.

Perceptual plausibility of exaggerated realistic motion.

The informal heuristic practices of the fine arts have much to offer to our understanding of the appearance of phenomenological reality. One interesting example is the use of exaggeration to enhance the illusion of liveliness in both living and nonliving subjects. This further eases the uncomfortable sense that the motion is somehow uncanny - especially with inanimate objects.

Dynamic properties in functional connectivity changes and striatal dopamine deficiency in Parkinson's disease.

Recent studies in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients reported disruptions in dynamic functional connectivity (dFC, i.e., a characterization of spontaneous fluctuations in functional connectivity over time).

A computational account of transsaccadic attentional allocation based on visual gain fields.

Coordination of goal-directed behavior depends on the brain's ability to recover the locations of relevant objects in the world. In humans, the visual system encodes the spatial organization of sensory inputs, but neurons in early visual areas map objects according to their retinal positions, rather than where they are in the world. How the brain computes world-referenced spatial information across eye movements has been widely researched and debated.

Sensorimotor prediction is used to direct gaze toward task-relevant locations in a goal-directed throwing task.

Previous research has shown that action effects of self-generated movements are internally predicted before outcome feedback becomes available. To test whether these sensorimotor predictions are used to facilitate visual information uptake for feedback processing, we measured eye movements during the execution of a goal-directed throwing task. Participants could fully observe the effects of their throwing actions (ball trajectory and either hitting or missing a target) in most of the trials.

The time course of person perception from voices in the brain.

When listeners hear a voice, they rapidly form a complex first impression of who the person behind that voice might be. We characterize how these multivariate first impressions from voices emerge over time across different levels of abstraction using electroencephalography and representational similarity analysis. We find that for eight perceived physical (gender, age, and health), trait (attractiveness, dominance, and trustworthiness), and social characteristics (educatedness and professionalism), representations emerge early (~80 ms after stimulus onset), with voice acoustics contributing to those representations between ~100 ms and 400 ms.

Larger putamen in individuals at risk and with manifest bipolar disorder.

Background: Individuals at risk for bipolar disorder (BD) have a wide range of genetic and non-genetic risk factors, like a positive family history of BD or (sub)threshold affective symptoms. Yet, it is unclear whether these individuals at risk and those diagnosed with BD share similar gray matter brain alterations.

Methods: In 410 male and female participants aged 17-35 years, we compared gray matter volume (3T MRI) between individuals at risk for BD (as assessed using the EPI scale; = 208), patients with a DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of BD ( = 87), and healthy controls ( = 115) using voxel-based morphometry in SPM12/CAT12.

Perceptual dimensions of wood materials.

Materials exhibit an extraordinary range of visual appearances. Characterizing and quantifying appearance is important not only for basic research on perceptual mechanisms but also for computer graphics and a wide range of industrial applications. Although methods exist for capturing and representing the optical properties of materials and how they vary across surfaces (Haindl & Filip, 2013), the representations are typically very high-dimensional, and how these representations relate to subjective perceptual impressions of material appearance remains poorly understood.

Individual differences in human gaze behavior generalize from faces to objects.

Individuals differ in where they fixate on a face, with some looking closer to the eyes while others prefer the mouth region. These individual biases are highly robust, generalize from the lab to the outside world, and have been associated with social cognition and associated disorders. However, it is unclear, whether these biases are specific to faces or influenced by domain-general mechanisms of vision.

Frequency-specific and periodic masking of peripheral characters by delayed foveal input.

The foveal-feedback mechanism supports peripheral object recognition by processing information about peripheral objects in foveal retinotopic visual cortex. When a foveal object is asynchronously presented with a peripheral target, peripheral discrimination performance is affected differently depending on the relationship between the foveal and peripheral objects. However, it is not clear whether the delayed foveal input competes for foveal resources with the information processed by foveal-feedback or masks it.

Where do the hypotheses come from? Data-driven learning in science and the brain.

Everyone agrees that testing hypotheses is important, but Bowers et al. provide scant details about where hypotheses about perception and brain function should come from. We suggest that the answer lies in considering how information about the outside world could be acquired - that is, learned - over the course of evolution and development.

SLC26 Anion Transporters.

Solute carrier family 26 (SLC26) is a family of functionally diverse anion transporters found in all kingdoms of life. Anions transported by SLC26 proteins include chloride, bicarbonate, and sulfate, but also small organic dicarboxylates such as fumarate and oxalate. The human genome encodes ten functional homologs, several of which are causally associated with severe human diseases, highlighting their physiological importance.

Elevator-like movements of prestin mediate outer hair cell electromotility.

The outstanding acuity of the mammalian ear relies on cochlear amplification, an active mechanism based on the electromotility (eM) of outer hair cells. eM is a piezoelectric mechanism generated by little-understood, voltage-induced conformational changes of the anion transporter homolog prestin (SLC26A5). We used a combination of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and biophysical approaches to identify the structural dynamics of prestin that mediate eM.

A primitive-based representation of dance: modulations by experience and perceptual validity.

The generation of complex movements such as dance might be possible due to the utilization of movement building blocks, i.e., movement primitives.