Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Musical Expertise Generalizes To Superior Temporal Scaling In A Morse Code Tapping Task, Matthew A. Slayton, Juan L. Romero-Sosa, Katrina Shore, Dean V. Buonomano, Indre Viskontas

Psychology

A key feature of the brain’s ability to tell time and generate complex temporal patterns is its capacity to produce similar temporal patterns at different speeds. For example, humans can tie a shoe, type, or play an instrument at different speeds or tempi—a phenomenon referred to as temporal scaling. While it is well established that training improves timing precision and accuracy, it is not known whether expertise improves temporal scaling, and if so, whether it generalizes across skill domains. We quantified temporal scaling and timing precision in musicians and non-musicians as they learned to tap a Morse code sequence. We …

How Useful Is Electroencephalography In The Diagnosis Of Autism Spectrum Disorders And The Delineation Of Subtypes: A Systematic Review, Oana Gurau, William Bosl, Charles R. Newton

Nursing and Health Professions Faculty Research and Publications

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are thought to be associated with abnormal neural connectivity. Presently, neural connectivity is a theoretical construct that cannot be easily measured. Research in network science and time series analysis suggests that neural network structure, a marker of neural activity, can be measured with electroencephalography (EEG). EEG can be quantified by different methods of analysis to potentially detect brain abnormalities. The aim of this review is to examine evidence for the utility of three methods of EEG signal analysis in the ASD diagnosis and subtype delineation. We conducted a review of literature in which 40 studies were …

Cognitive And Neural Consequences Of Memory Suppression In Major Depressive Disorder, M. D. Sacchet, Benjamin Levy, J. P. Hamilton, A. Maksimovskiy, P. T. Hertel, J. Joormann, Michael C. Anderson, A. D. Wagner, I. H. Gotlib

Psychology

Negative biases in cognition have been documented consistently in major depressive disorder (MDD), including difficulties in the ability to control the processing of negative material. Although negative information-processing biases have been studied using both behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms, relatively little research has been conducted examining the difficulties of depressed persons with inhibiting the retrieval of negative information from long-term memory. In this study, we used the think/no-think paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the cognitive and neural consequences of memory suppression in individuals diagnosed with depression and in healthy controls. The participants showed typical behavioral forgetting effects, but …

Positive Clinical Neuroscience: Explorations In Positive Neurology, N. Kapur, J. Cole, T. Manly, Indre Viskontas, A. Ninteman, L. Hasher, A. Pascual-Leone

Psychology

Disorders of the brain and its sensory organs have traditionally been associated with deficits in movement, perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior. It is increasingly evident, however, that positive phenomena may also occur in such conditions, with implications for the individual, science, medicine, and for society. This article provides a selective review of such positive phenomena – enhanced function after brain lesions, better-than-normal performance in people with sensory loss, creativity associated with neurological disease, and enhanced performance associated with aging. We propose that, akin to the well-established field of positive psychology and the emerging field of positive clinical psychology, the nascent …

Purging Of Memories From Conscious Awareness Tracked In The Human Brain, Benjamin Levy, Michael C. Anderson

Psychology

Understanding the neural basis of conscious experience and its regulation are fundamental goals of science. While recent research has made substantial progress in identifying the neural correlates of conscious experiences, it remains unclear how individuals exert control over the contents of awareness. In particular, can a memory that has entered the aware state be purged from consciousness if it is not currently desired? Here we tracked the correlates of consciousness in humans using functional magnetic resonance imaging and demonstrated the involvement of a downregulation mechanism that purges contents from conscious awareness. When individuals tried to prevent the retrieval of a …

Ensembles Of Human Mtl Neurons "Jump Back In Time" In Response To A Repeated Stimulus, M. W. Howard, Indre Viskontas, K. H. Shankar, I. Fried

Psychology

Episodic memory, which depends critically on the integrity of the medial temporal lobe (MTL), has been described as ‘‘mental time travel’’ in which the rememberer ‘‘jumps back in time.’’ The neural mechanism underlying this ability remains elusive. Mathematical and computational models of performance in episodic memory tasks provide a specific hypothesis regarding the computation that supports such a jump back in time. The models suggest that a representation of temporal context, a representation that changes gradually over macroscopic periods of time, is the cue for episodic recall. According to these models, a jump back in time corresponds to a stimulus …

Anti-Saccade Performance Predicts Executive Function And Brain Structure In Normal Elders, J. B. Mirsky, H. W. Heuer, A. Jafari, J. H. Kramer, A. K. Schenk, Indre Viskontas, B. L. Miller, A. L. Boxer

Psychology

Objective—To assess the neuropsychological and anatomical correlates of anti-saccade (AS) task performance in normal elders.

Background—The AS task correlates with neuropsychological measures of executive function and frontal lobe volume in neurological diseases, but has not been studied in a well-characterized normal elderly population. Because executive dysfunction can indicate an increased risk for cognitive decline in cognitively normal elders, we hypothesized that AS performance might be a sensitive test of age-related processes that impair cognition.

Method—The percentage of correct AS responses was evaluated in forty-eight normal elderly subjects and compared with neuropsychological test performance using linear regression analysis …

Multimodal Cuing Of Autobiographical Memory In Semantic Dementia, D. L. Greenberg, J. M. Ogar, Indre Viskontas, M. L. Gorno Tempini, B. Miller, B. J. Knowlton

Psychology

OBJECTIVE: Individuals with semantic dementia (SD) have impaired autobiographical memory (AM), but the extent of the impairment has been controversial. According to one report (Westmacott, Leach, Freedman, & Moscovitch, 2001), patient performance was better when visual cues were used instead of verbal cues; however, the visual cues used in that study (family photographs) provided more retrieval support than do the word cues that are typically used in AM studies. In the present study, we sought to disentangle the effects of retrieval support and cue modality.

METHOD: We cued AMs of 5 patients with SD and 5 controls with words, simple …

Neural Activity In The Hippocampus And Perirhinal Cortex During Encoding Is Associated With The Durability Of Episodic Memory, V. A. Carr, Indre Viskontas, S. A. Engel, B. J. Knowlton

Psychology

Studies examining medial temporal lobe (MTL) involvement in memory formation typically assess memory performance after a single, short delay. Thus, the relationship between MTL encoding activity and memory durability over time remains poorly characterized. To explore this relationship, we scanned participants using high-resolution functional imaging of the MTL as they encoded object pairs; using the remember/know paradigm, we then assessed memory performance for studied items both 10 min and 1 week later. Encoding trials were classified as either subsequently recollected across both delays, transiently recollected (i.e., recollected at 10 min but not after 1 week), consistently familiar, or consistently forgotten. …

Contrasting Roles Of Neural Firing Rate And Local Field Potentials In Human Memory, A. Ekstrom, Indre Viskontas, M. Kahana, J. Jacobs, K. Upchurch, S. Bookheimer, I. Fried

Psychology

Recording the activity of neurons is a mainstay of animal memory research, while human recordings are generally limited to the activity of large ensembles of cells. The relationship between ensemble activity and neural firing rate during declarative memory processes, however, remains unclear. We recorded neurons and local field potentials (LFPs) simultaneously from the same sites in the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (ERC) in patients with implanted intracranial electrodes during a virtual taxi-driver task that also included a memory retrieval component. Neurons increased their firing rate in response to specific passengers or landmarks both during navigation and retrieval. Although we …

Differences In Mnemonic Processing By Neurons In The Human Hippocampus And Parahippocampal Regions, Indre Viskontas, B. J. Knowlton, P. N. Steinmetz, I. Fried

Psychology

Different structures within the medial-temporal lobe likely make distinct contributions to declarative memory. In particular, several current psychological and computational models of memory predict that the hippocampus and parahippocampal regions play different roles in the formation and retrieval of declarative memories [e.g., Norman, K. A., & O'Reilly, R. C. Modeling hippocampal and neocortical contributions to recognition memory: A complementary-learning systems approach. Psychological Review, 110, 611-646, 2003]. Here, we examined the neuronal firing patterns in these two regions during recognition memory. Recording directly from neurons in humans, we find that cells in both regions respond to novel stimuli with an increase …

Remote Episodic Memory Deficits In Patients With Unilateral Temporal Lobe Epilepsy And Excisions, Indre Viskontas, M. P. Mcandrews, M. Moscovitch

Psychology

The nature of remote memory impairment in patients with medial temporal lobe damage is the subject of some debate. While some investigators have found that retrograde amnesia in such patients is temporally graded, with relative sparing of remote memories (Squire and Alvarez, 1995), others contend that impairment is of very long duration and that remote memories are not necessarily spared (Sanders and Warrington, 1971; Nadel and Moscovitch, 1997). In this study, remote memory was assessed in 25 patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy and 22 non-neurologically impaired controls using the Autobiographical Memory Interview (Kopelman et al., 1989). Results indicate that …