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Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology

Belief About Nicotine Selectively Modulates Value And Reward Prediction Error Signals In Smokers, Xiaosi Gu, Terry Lohrenz, Ramiro Salas, Philip R. Baldwin, Alireza Soltani Feb 2015

Belief About Nicotine Selectively Modulates Value And Reward Prediction Error Signals In Smokers, Xiaosi Gu, Terry Lohrenz, Ramiro Salas, Philip R. Baldwin, Alireza Soltani

Dartmouth Scholarship

Little is known about how prior beliefs impact biophysically described processes in the presence of neuroactive drugs, which presents a profound challenge to the understanding of the mechanisms and treatments of addiction. We engineered smokers' prior beliefs about the presence of nicotine in a cigarette smoked before a functional magnetic resonance imaging session where subjects carried out a sequential choice task. Using a model-based approach, we show that smokers' beliefs about nicotine specifically modulated learning signals (value and reward prediction error) defined by a computational model of mesolimbic dopamine systems. Belief of "no nicotine in cigarette" (compared with "nicotine in …


Dissociation Between Face Perception And Face Memory In Adults, But Not Children, With Developmental Prosopagnosia, Kirsten A. Dalrymple, Lúcia Garrido, Brad Duchaine Oct 2014

Dissociation Between Face Perception And Face Memory In Adults, But Not Children, With Developmental Prosopagnosia, Kirsten A. Dalrymple, Lúcia Garrido, Brad Duchaine

Dartmouth Scholarship

Cognitive models propose that face recognition is accomplished through a series of discrete stages, including perceptual representation of facial structure, and encoding and retrieval of facial information. This implies that impaired face recognition can result from failures of face perception, face memory, or both. Studies of acquired prosopagnosia, autism spectrum disorders, and the development of normal face recognition support the idea that face perception and face memory are distinct processes, yet this distinction has received little attention in developmental prosopagnosia (DP). To address this issue, we tested the face perception and face memory of children and adults with DP. By …


Socially Excluded Individuals Fail To Recruit Medial Prefrontal Cortex For Negative Social Scenes, Katherine E. Powers, Dylan D. Wagner, Catherine J. Norris, Todd F. Heatherton Nov 2013

Socially Excluded Individuals Fail To Recruit Medial Prefrontal Cortex For Negative Social Scenes, Katherine E. Powers, Dylan D. Wagner, Catherine J. Norris, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

Converging behavioral evidence suggests that people respond to experiences of social exclusion with both defensive and affiliative strategies, allowing them to avoid further distress while also encouraging re-establishment of positive social connections. However, there are unresolved questions regarding the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's responses to social exclusion. Here, we sought to gain insight into these behavioral tendencies by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the impact of social exclusion on neural responses to visual scenes that varied on dimensions of sociality and emotional valence. Compared to socially included participants, socially excluded participants failed to recruit dorsomedial prefrontal cortex …


Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton Aug 2013

Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

The ability to self-regulate can become impaired when people are required to engage in successive acts of effortful self-control, even when self-control occurs in different domains. Here, we used functional neuroimaging to test whether engaging in effortful inhibition in the cognitive domain would lead to putative dysfunction in the emotional domain. Forty-eight participants viewed images of emotional scenes during functional magnetic resonance imaging in two sessions that were separated by a challenging attention control task that required effortful inhibition (depletion group) or not (control group). Compared to the control group, depleted participants showed increased activity in the left amygdala to …


Adenosine Deaminase Enhances The Immunogenicity Of Human Dendritic Cells From Healthy And Hiv-Infected Individuals, Víctor Casanova, Isaac Isaac Naval-Macabuhay, Marta Massanella, Marta Rodríguez-García Dec 2012

Adenosine Deaminase Enhances The Immunogenicity Of Human Dendritic Cells From Healthy And Hiv-Infected Individuals, Víctor Casanova, Isaac Isaac Naval-Macabuhay, Marta Massanella, Marta Rodríguez-García

Dartmouth Scholarship

ADA is an enzyme implicated in purine metabolism, and is critical to ensure normal immune function. Its congenital deficit leads to severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). ADA binding to adenosine receptors on dendritic cell surface enables T-cell costimulation through CD26 crosslinking, which enhances T-cell activation and proliferation. Despite a large body of work on the actions of the ecto-enzyme ADA on T-cell activation, questions arise on whether ADA can also modulate dendritic cell maturation. To this end we investigated the effects of ADA on human monocyte derived dendritic cell biology. Our results show that both the enzymatic and non-enzymatic activities of …


Amygdala Responses To Averted Vs Direct Gaze Fear Vary As A Function Of Presentation Speed, Reginald B. Adams, Robert G. Franklin Jr, Kestutis Kveraga, Nalini Ambady, Robert E. Kleck, Paul J. Whalen, Nouchine Hadjikhani, Anthony J. Nelson Jun 2012

Amygdala Responses To Averted Vs Direct Gaze Fear Vary As A Function Of Presentation Speed, Reginald B. Adams, Robert G. Franklin Jr, Kestutis Kveraga, Nalini Ambady, Robert E. Kleck, Paul J. Whalen, Nouchine Hadjikhani, Anthony J. Nelson

Dartmouth Scholarship

We examined whether amygdala responses to rapidly presented fear expressions are preferentially tuned to averted vs direct gaze fear and conversely whether responses to more sustained presentations are preferentially tuned to direct vs averted gaze fear. We conducted three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to test these predictions including: Study 1: a block design employing sustained presentations (1 s) of averted vs direct gaze fear expressions taken from the Pictures of Facial Affect; Study 2: a block design employing rapid presentations (300 ms) of these same stimuli and Study 3: a direct replication of these studies in the context …


Aging Is Associated With Positive Responding To Neutral Information But Reduced Recovery From Negative Information, Carien M. Van Reekum, Stacey M. Schaefer, Regina C. Lapate, Catherine J. Norris, Lawrence L. Greischar, Richard J. Davidson Apr 2011

Aging Is Associated With Positive Responding To Neutral Information But Reduced Recovery From Negative Information, Carien M. Van Reekum, Stacey M. Schaefer, Regina C. Lapate, Catherine J. Norris, Lawrence L. Greischar, Richard J. Davidson

Dartmouth Scholarship

Studies on aging and emotion suggest an increase in reported positive affect, a processing bias of positive over negative information, as well as increasingly adaptive regulation in response to negative events with advancing age. These findings imply that older individuals evaluate information differently, resulting in lowered reactivity to, and/or faster recovery from, negative information, while maintaining more positive responding to positive information. We examined this hypothesis in an ongoing study on Midlife in the US (MIDUS II) where emotional reactivity and recovery were assessed in a large number of respondents (N = 159) from a wide age range (36–84 …


Mind Perception: Real But Not Artificial Faces Sustain Neural Activity Beyond The N170/Vpp, Thalia Wheatley, Anna Weinberg, Christine Looser, Tim Moran, Greg Hajcak Mar 2011

Mind Perception: Real But Not Artificial Faces Sustain Neural Activity Beyond The N170/Vpp, Thalia Wheatley, Anna Weinberg, Christine Looser, Tim Moran, Greg Hajcak

Dartmouth Scholarship

Faces are visual objects that hold special significance as the icons of other minds. Previous researchers using event-related potentials (ERPs) have found that faces are uniquely associated with an increased N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a more sustained frontal positivity. Here, we examined the processing of faces as objects vs. faces as cues to minds by contrasting images of faces possessing minds (human faces), faces lacking minds (doll faces), and non-face objects (i.e., clocks). Although both doll and human faces were associated with an increased N170/VPP from 175–200 ms following stimulus onset, only human faces were associated with a sustained …


Differential Activation Of Frontoparietal Attention Networks By Social And Symbolic Spatial Cues, Andrew D. Engell, Lauri Nummenmaa, Nikolaas N. Oosterhof, Richard N. Henson, James V. Haxby, Andrew J. Calder Mar 2010

Differential Activation Of Frontoparietal Attention Networks By Social And Symbolic Spatial Cues, Andrew D. Engell, Lauri Nummenmaa, Nikolaas N. Oosterhof, Richard N. Henson, James V. Haxby, Andrew J. Calder

Dartmouth Scholarship

Perception of both gaze-direction and symbolic directional cues (e.g. arrows) orient an observer’s attention toward the indicated location. It is unclear, however, whether these similar behavioral effects are examples of the same attentional phenomenon and, therefore, subserved by the same neural substrate. It has been proposed that gaze, given its evolutionary significance, constitutes a ‘special’ category of spatial cue. As such, it is predicted that the neural systems supporting spatial reorienting will be different for gaze than for non-biological symbols. We tested this prediction using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain’s response during target localization in which laterally …


Microsaccade Rate Varies With Subjective Visibility During Motion-Induced Blindness, Po-Jang Hsieh, Peter U. Tse Apr 2009

Microsaccade Rate Varies With Subjective Visibility During Motion-Induced Blindness, Po-Jang Hsieh, Peter U. Tse

Dartmouth Scholarship

Motion-induced blindness (MIB) occurs when a dot embedded in a motion field subjectively vanishes. Here we report the first psychophysical data concerning effects of microsaccade/eyeblink rate upon perceptual switches during MIB. We find that the rate of microsaccades/eyeblink rises before and after perceptual transitions from not seeing to seeing the dot, and decreases before perceptual transitions from seeing it to not seeing it. In addition, event-related fMRI data reveal that, when a dot subjectively reappears during MIB, the blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal increases in V1v and V2v and decreases in contralateral hMT+. These BOLD signal changes observed upon perceptual …


Medial Temporal Lobe Bold Activity At Rest Predicts Individual Differences In Memory Ability In Hhealthy Young Adults, Gagan S. Wig, Scott T. Grafton, Kathryn E. Demos, George L. Wolford, Steven E. Petersen, William M. Kelley Nov 2008

Medial Temporal Lobe Bold Activity At Rest Predicts Individual Differences In Memory Ability In Hhealthy Young Adults, Gagan S. Wig, Scott T. Grafton, Kathryn E. Demos, George L. Wolford, Steven E. Petersen, William M. Kelley

Dartmouth Scholarship

Human beings differ in their ability to form and retrieve lasting long-term memories. To explore the source of these individual differences, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in healthy young adults (n = 50) during periods of resting fixation that were interleaved with periods of simple cognitive tasks. We report that medial temporal lobe BOLD activity during periods of rest predicts individual differences in memory ability. Specifically, individuals who exhibited greater magnitudes of task-induced deactivations in medial temporal lobe BOLD signal (as compared to periods of rest) demonstrated superior memory during offline testing. This relationship …


Switching Language Switches Mind: Linguistic Effects On Developmental Neural Bases Of ‘Theory Of Mind’, Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, Elise Temple Feb 2008

Switching Language Switches Mind: Linguistic Effects On Developmental Neural Bases Of ‘Theory Of Mind’, Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, Elise Temple

Dartmouth Scholarship

Theory of mind (ToM)—our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions—has been examined through false-belief (FB) tasks. We studied 12 Japanese early bilingual children (8−12 years of age) and 16 late bilingual adults (18−40 years of age) with FB tasks in Japanese [first language (L1)] and English [second language (L2)], using fMRI. Children recruited more brain regions than adults for processing ToM tasks in both languages. Moreover, children showed an overlap in brain activity between the L1 and L2 ToM conditions in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Adults did not show such a convergent activity …


Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae May 2007

Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae

Dartmouth Scholarship

The ability to detect agency is fundamental for understanding the social world. Underlying this capacity are neural circuits that respond to patterns of intentional biological motion in the superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction. Here we show that the brain's blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response to such motion is modulated by the representation of the actor. Dynamic social interactions were portrayed by either live-action agents or computer-animated agents, enacting the exact same patterns of biological motion. Using an event-related design, we found that the BOLD response associated with the perception and interpretation of agency was greater when identical physical …


Prior Experience As A Stimulus Category Confound: An Example Using Facial Expressions Of Emotion, Leah H. Somerville, Paul J. Whalen Dec 2006

Prior Experience As A Stimulus Category Confound: An Example Using Facial Expressions Of Emotion, Leah H. Somerville, Paul J. Whalen

Dartmouth Scholarship

Facial expressions of emotion represent a stimulus set widely used to assess a broad range of psychological processes. However, a consideration of systematic differences between expression categories, other than differences relating to characteristics of the expressions themselves, has remained largely unaddressed. By collecting experience rankings in a large sample of undergraduates, we observed that the amount of reported experience individuals have had with different facial expressions of emotion systematically differed between all expression categories. These findings shed light on the potential for identifying confounds inherent to comparing some stimulus categories and, in this case, may aid in the interpretation of …


Visibility, Visual Awareness, And Visual Masking Of Simple Unattended Targets Are Confined To Areas In The Occipital Cortex Beyond Human V1/V2, Peter U. Tse, Susanna Martinez-Conde, Alexander A. Schlegel, Stephen L. Macknik Nov 2005

Visibility, Visual Awareness, And Visual Masking Of Simple Unattended Targets Are Confined To Areas In The Occipital Cortex Beyond Human V1/V2, Peter U. Tse, Susanna Martinez-Conde, Alexander A. Schlegel, Stephen L. Macknik

Dartmouth Scholarship

In visual masking, visible targets are rendered invisible by modifying the context in which they are presented, but not by modifying the targets themselves. Here, we localize the neuronal correlates of visual awareness in the human brain by using visual masking illusions. We compare monoptic visual masking activation, which we find within all retinotopic visual areas, with dichoptic masking activation, which we find only in those retinotopic areas downstream of V2. Because monoptic and dichoptic masking are equivalent in magnitude perceptually, the present results establish a lower bound for maintenance of visual awareness of simple unattended targets. Moreover, we find …


Donepezil Effects On Mood In Patients With Schizophrenia And Schizoaffective Disorder, S Craig Risch, Michael D. Horner, Susan R. Mcgurk, Simmy Palecko, John S. Markowitz, Ziad Nahas, C. Lindsay Devane Jul 2005

Donepezil Effects On Mood In Patients With Schizophrenia And Schizoaffective Disorder, S Craig Risch, Michael D. Horner, Susan R. Mcgurk, Simmy Palecko, John S. Markowitz, Ziad Nahas, C. Lindsay Devane

Dartmouth Scholarship

Donepezil, 5 mg/d for 6 wk then 10 mg/d for 6 wk, and placebo daily for 12 wk in a double-blind cross-over paradigm, was added to the therapeutic regimen of 13 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders, clinically stable on atypical antipsychotic medications. Patients had varying degrees of depressive symptoms, ranging from no depression to clinically significant depression. There was no worsening or induction of depression in individual patients or the group as a whole. In addition there was a statistically significant antidepressant effect in the group as a whole during the donepezil condition and a clinically significant antidepressant effect …


Distinct Neural Systems Subserve Person And Object Knowledge, Jason P. Mitchell, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae Nov 2002

Distinct Neural Systems Subserve Person And Object Knowledge, Jason P. Mitchell, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae

Dartmouth Scholarship

Studies using functional neuroimaging and patient populations have demonstrated that distinct brain regions subserve semantic knowledge for different classes of inanimate objects (e.g., tools, musical instruments, and houses). What this work has yet to consider, however, is how conceptual knowledge about people may be organized in the brain. In particular, is there a distinct functional neuroanatomy associated with person knowledge? By using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measured neural activity while participants made semantic judgments about people or objects. A unique pattern of brain activity was associated with person judgments and included brain regions previously implicated in other …