Psychology Commons^™

Brain Activity And Medical Diagnosis: An Eeg Study, Laila M. Ribas, Fábio T. Rocha, Neli R. Ortega, Armando F. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Despite new brain imaging techniques that have improved the study of the underlying processes of human decision-making, to the best of our knowledge, there have been very few studies that have attempted to investigate brain activity during medical diagnostic processing.The main purpose of this paper was to investigate brain electroencephalography (EEG) activity associated with diagnostic decision-making in the realm of veterinary medicine using X-rays as a fundamental auxiliary test. The principal component analysis revealed four patterns that accounted for 85% of the total variance in the EEG activity recorded while veterinary doctors read a clinical history, examined an X-ray image …

Decoding The Neural Mechanisms Of Human Tool Use., Jason P Gallivan, D Adam Mclean, Kenneth F Valyear, Jody C Culham

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Sophisticated tool use is a defining characteristic of the primate species but how is it supported by the brain, particularly the human brain? Here we show, using functional MRI and pattern classification methods, that tool use is subserved by multiple distributed action-centred neural representations that are both shared with and distinct from those of the hand. In areas of frontoparietal cortex we found a common representation for planned hand- and tool-related actions. In contrast, in parietal and occipitotemporal regions implicated in hand actions and body perception we found that coding remained selectively linked to upcoming actions of the hand whereas …

Fkbp5 Modulates Attention Bias For Threat: Associations With Hippocampal Function And Morphology, Negar Fani, David Gutman, Erin Tone, Lynn Almli, Kristina B. Mercer, Jennifer Davis, Ebony Glover, Tanja Jovanovic, Bekh Bradley, Ivo D. Dinov, Alen Zamanyan, Arthur W. Toga, Elisabeth B. Binder, Kerry J. Ressler

Psychology Faculty Publications

Context: The FKBP5 gene product regulates glucocorticoid receptor (GR) sensitivity and hypothalamicpituitary‐adrenal axis functioning, and has been associated with a number of stress‐related psychiatric disorders. The study of intermediate phenotypes, such as emotion‐processing biases and their neural substrates, provides a way to clarify the mechanisms by which FKBP5 dysregulation mediates psychopathology risk.

Objective: To examine whether allelic variations for a putatively functional SNP associated with FKBP5 gene regulation (rs1360780) would relate differentially to attentional bias for threat; this was measured through behavioral response on a dot probe task and hippocampal activation during task performance. Morphological substrates of differential hippocampal response …

Dot Polarity In Dynamic Glass Patterns, Dawn Vreven, Timothy Petersik, Jim Dannemiller, Jamie Schrauth

Dawn L Vreven

Each frame of a Glass pattern consists of a random placement of dots and a spatially shifted copy of this pattern. Thus, each dot has a partner, forming dot-pair dipoles. When shown in succession, motion is perceived along the axis of the spatial shift. The perception of motion in dynamic Glass patterns is believed to be a two-stage process: first, local orientation detectors respond to the orientation signal in the dot-pair dipole; and second, global detectors integrate local orientation signals. We examined the ability to detect rotation in dynamic Glass patterns whose dipoles contained a) the same polarity, b) opposite …

Integration Of Speed Signals In The Direction Of Motion, Dawn Vreven, Preeti Verghese

Dawn L Vreven

Speed discrimination tasks were used to examine the spatial and temporal characteristics of the integration mechanism involved when signals are extended in the direction of motion. We varied the aspect ratio of a signal patch whose speed differed from the background, while holding the area of the signal patch constant, so that the signal patch could be either extended in the direction of motion or extended orthogonal to the direction of motion. Speed discrimination thresholds decreased dramatically as the signal patch was extended in the direction of motion. The spatial and temporal integration regions were larger than would be expected …