Cognition and functional connectivity

Whisker trimming is very common in C57BL/6J mice. Dewhiskering may lead to an alteration in the thalamocortical connectivity and relevant behavioral functions. Since C57BL/6J is a commonly used strain for neurobehavioral studies, it is important to examine how whisker dependent heterogeneity affects the internal validity of behavioral phenotypes. The present study aimed to investigate the responsiveness of mice to different behavioral test paradigms in the presence or absence of whiskers. We employed two models of whisker deprivation: Acute Whisker Desensitization (AWD) and Chronic Habitual Dewhiskering (CHD)...

Visuomotor ability is quite crucial for everyday functioning, particularly in driving and sports. While there is accumulating evidence regarding neural correlates of visuomotor transformation, less is known about the brain regions that accommodate visuomotor mapping under different cognitive demands. We concurrently measured cortical activity and pupillary response, using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and eye-tracking glasses, to examine the neural systems linked to pupil dilation under varying cognitive demands...

OBJECTIVE: To explore the structural and functional integrity of the sustained attention system in patients with pediatric multiple sclerosis (MS) and its effect on cognitive impairment. METHODS: We enrolled 57 patients with pediatric MS and 14 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs). Patients with >3 abnormal tests at neuropsychological evaluation were classified as cognitively impaired (CI). Sustained attention system activity was studied with fMRI during the Conners Continuous Performance Test (CCPT)...

Although frontostriatal circuits are critical for the temporal control of action, how time is encoded in frontostriatal circuits is unknown. We recorded from frontal and striatal neurons while rats engaged in interval timing, an elementary cognitive function that engages both areas. We report four main results. First, 'ramping' activity-a monotonic change in neuronal firing rate across time-is observed throughout frontostriatal ensembles. Second, frontostriatal activity scales across multiple intervals. Third, striatal ramping neurons are correlated with activity of the medial frontal cortex...

The perirhinal cortex (PER), which is critical for associative memory and stimulus discrimination, has been described as a wall of inhibition between the neocortex and hippocampus. With advanced age, rats show deficits on PER-dependent behavioral tasks and fewer PER principal neurons are activated by stimuli, but the role of PER interneurons in these altered circuit properties in old age has not been characterized. In the present study, PER neurons were recorded while rats traversed a circular track bi-directionally in which the track was either empty or contained 8 novel objects evenly spaced around the track...

Prior research points to a positive concurrent relationship between reasoning ability and both fronto-parietal structural connectivity, as measured by diffusion tensor imaging (e.g. Tamnes et al., 2010), and fronto-parietal functional connectivity, as measured by fMRI (e.g. Cocchi et al., 2014). Further, recent research demonstrates a link between reasoning ability and functional connectivity of two brain regions in particular: rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC) and the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) (Wendelken et al...

The high energy demands of the brain underscore the importance of nutrition in maintaining brain health and further indicate that aspects of nutrition may optimize brain health, in turn enhancing cognitive performance. General intelligence represents a critical cognitive ability that has been well characterized by cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists alike, but the extent to which a driver of brain health, namely nutritional status, impacts the neural mechanisms that underlie general intelligence is not understood...

Cognitive neuroscience seeks to discover how cognitive functions are implemented in neural circuits. Studies of plasticity in blindness suggest that this mind-brain mapping is highly flexible during development. In blindness, 'visual' cortices take on higher-cognitive functions, including language and mathematics, becoming sensitive to the grammatical structure of spoken sentences and the difficulty of math equations. Visual cortex activity at rest becomes synchronized with higher-cognitive networks. Such repurposing is striking in light of the cognitive and evolutionary differences between vision, language, and mathematics...

Cognitive neuroscience seeks to discover how cognitive functions are implemented in neural circuits. Studies of plasticity in blindness suggest that this mind-brain mapping is highly flexible during development. In blindness, 'visual' cortices take on higher-cognitive functions, including language and mathematics, becoming sensitive to the grammatical structure of spoken sentences and the difficulty of math equations. Visual cortex activity at rest becomes synchronized with higher-cognitive networks. Such repurposing is striking in light of the cognitive and evolutionary differences between vision, language, and mathematics...

BACKGROUND: Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is characterized by cognitive functional decline, especially in memory. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been widely used in neuroimaging studies that explore alterations between patients and normal individuals to elucidate the pathological mechanisms of different diseases. The current study was performed to investigate alterations in the functional connectivity of the default mode network (DMN) in aMCI patients compared to healthy elderly controls, as well as further define the association between neurological alterations and memory function...

The functional contribution of the lateral prefrontal cortex to behavior has been discussed with reference to several higher-order cognitive domains. In a separate line of research, recent studies have focused on the anatomical organization of this part of the brain. However, these different approaches are rarely combined. Here, we combine previous work using anatomical connectivity that identified a lateral subdivision of the human frontal pole and work that suggested a general role for rostrolateral prefrontal cortex in processing higher-order relations, irrespective of the type of information...

Impaired functional connectivity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) may be involved in the progression of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC) is a potential imaging marker for monitoring the progression of AD. Previous studies did not focus on the functional connectivity between the PCC and nodes in regions outside the DMN, but our study is an effort to explore these overlooked functional connections. For collecting data, we used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Granger Causality Analysis (GCA)...

Geroderma osteodysplastica (GO) is a subtype of cutis laxa syndrome characterized by congenital wrinkly skin, a prematurely aged face, extremely short stature, and osteoporosis leading to recurrent fractures. GO exhibits an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern and is caused by loss-of-function mutations in GORAB, which encodes a protein important for Golgi-related transport. Using whole exome sequencing, we identified novel compound heterozygous nonsense mutations in the GORAB in a GO patient. The patient was a 14-year-old Japanese boy...

Statistical learning is a fundamental mechanism of the brain, which extracts and represents regularities of our environment. Statistical learning is crucial in predictive processing, and in the acquisition of perceptual, motor, cognitive, and social skills. Although previous studies have revealed competitive neurocognitive processes underlying statistical learning, the neural communication of the related brain regions (functional connectivity, FC) has not yet been investigated. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating FC networks that promote statistical learning in humans...

Loss of ovarian function in women is associated with sleep disturbances and cognitive decline, which suggest a key role for estrogens and/or progestins in modulating these symptoms. The effects of ovarian hormones on sleep and cognitive processes have been studied in separate research fields that seldom intersect. However, sleep has a considerable impact on cognitive function. Given the tight connections between sleep and cognition, ovarian hormones may influence selective aspects of cognition indirectly, via the modulation of sleep...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by motor and nonmotor symptoms (NMS). Several subsequent studies substantiate the great functional burden related to NMS, their progression, and negative effect on quality of life in PD. Additional evidence indicates interesting relationships between striatal dopaminergic function and NMS. The basal ganglia are implicated in the modulation and integration of sensory information and pain, bladder function is under control of both inhibitory (D1) and facilitatory (D2) dopaminergic inputs, finally reduced dopaminergic activity in the mesocortical and mesolimbic pathways is involved in the development of several NMS including mood, motivational, and cognitive alterations...

Because of their difficulties with figurative language in conversation, it is commonly thought that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not understand figurative meaning. However, recent research indicates that individuals with and without ASD are similar in the first two stages of metaphor comprehension, up to and including successful generation of the figurative meaning. In the current study, we used a sentence decision task to evaluate the subsequent stage of metaphor comprehension, the selection stage, which requires suppression/inhibition of the unintended meaning as part of selecting the intended meaning...

In 2000, a landmark case report described the concurrent restoration of consciousness and thalamo-frontal connectivity after severe brain injury (Laureys et al., ). Being a single case however, this study could not disambiguate whether the result was specific to the restoration of consciousness per se as opposed to the return of complex cognitive function in general or simply the temporal evolution of post-injury pathophysiological events. To test whether the restoration of thalamo-cortical connectivity is specific to consciousness, 20 moderate-to-severe brain injury patients (from a recruited sample of 42) underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging within a week after injury and again six months later...

Previous studies in small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) patients have mainly focused on exploring neurocognitive deficits associated with prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI). Little is known about functional brain alterations that might occur due to chemotherapy treatment in this population before PCI is administered. For this reason, we used resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine potential functional connectivity disruptions in brain networks, including the Default Mode Network (DMN), the Sensorimotor Network, and the Task-Positive Network (TPN)...

Olfactory dysfunction is a common symptom associated with neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Although evidence exists to suggest that peripheral olfactory organs are involved in the olfactory dysfunction that accompanies AD pathology, the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. As confirmed using behavioral tests, transgenic mice overexpressing a Swedish mutant form of human amyloid precursor proteins exhibited olfactory impairments prior to evidence of cognitive impairment...