Neurosciences Commons^™

“Me & My Brain”: Exposing NeuroscienceʼS Closet Dualism, Liad Mudrik, Uri Maoz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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Our intuitive concept of the relations between brain and mind is increasingly challenged by the scientific world view. Yet, although few neuroscientists openly endorse Cartesian dualism, careful reading reveals dualistic intuitions in prominent neuroscientific texts. Here, we present the “double-subject fallacy”: treating the brain and the entire person as two independent subjects who can simultaneously occupy divergent psychological states and even have complex interactions with each other—as in “my brain knew before I did.” Although at first, such writing may appear like harmless, or even cute, shorthand, a closer look suggests that it can be seriously misleading. Surprisingly, this confused …

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Two Distinct Dynamic Modes Subtend The Detection Of Unexpected Sounds, Jean-Rémi King, Alexandre Gramfort, Aaron Schurger, Lionel Naccache, Stanislas Dehaene

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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The brain response to auditory novelty comprises two main EEG components: an early mismatch negativity and a late P300. Whereas the former has been proposed to reflect a prediction error, the latter is often associated with working memory updating. Interestingly, these two proposals predict fundamentally different dynamics: prediction errors are thought to propagate serially through several distinct brain areas, while working memory supposes that activity is sustained over time within a stable set of brain areas. Here we test this temporal dissociation by showing how the generalization of brain activity patterns across time can characterize the dynamics of the underlying …

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Reducing Multi-Sensor Data To A Single Time Course That Reveals Experimental Effects, Aaron Schurger, Sebastien Marti, Stanislas Dehaene

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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Background: Multi-sensor technologies such as EEG, MEG, and ECoG result in high-dimensional data sets. Given the high temporal resolution of such techniques, scientific questions very often focus on the time-course of an experimental effect. In many studies, researchers focus on a single sensor or the average over a subset of sensors covering a “region of interest” (ROI). However, single-sensor or ROI analyses ignore the fact that the spatial focus of activity is constantly changing, and fail to make full use of the information distributed over the sensor array.

Methods: We describe a technique that exploits the optimality and …

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Single-Trial Decoding Of Auditory Novelty Responses Facilitates The Detection Of Residual Consciousness, J. R. King, F. Faugeras, A. Gramfort, Aaron Schurger, I. El Karoui, J. D. Sitt, B. Rohaut, C. Wacongne, E. Labyt, T. Bekinschtein, L. Cohen, L. Naccache, S. Dehaene

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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Detecting residual consciousness in unresponsive patients is a major clinical concern and a challenge for theoretical neuroscience. To tackle this issue, we recently designed a paradigm that dissociates two electro-encephalographic (EEG) responses to auditory novelty. Whereas a local change in pitch automatically elicits a mismatch negativity (MMN), a change in global sound sequence leads to a late P300b response. The latter component is thought to be present only when subjects consciously perceive the global novelty. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to detect because individual variability is high, especially in clinical recordings. Here, we show that multivariate pattern classifiers can extract …

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Training Verb Argument Structure Production In Agrammatic Aphasia: Behavioral And Neural Recovery Patterns, Cynthia K. Thompson, Ellyn A. Riley, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, Sladjana Lukic

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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Introduction

Neuroimaging and lesion studies indicate a left hemisphere network for verb and verb argument structure processing, involving both frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. Although their verb comprehension is generally unimpaired, it is well known that individuals with agrammatic aphasia often present with verb production deficits, characterized by an argument structure complexity hierarchy, indicating faulty access to argument structure representations for production and integration into syntactic contexts. Recovery of verb processing in agrammatism, however, has received little attention and no studies have examined the neural mechanisms associated with improved verb and argument structure processing. In the present study we trained …

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Impairment Of Trkb-Psd-95 Signaling In Angelman Syndrome, Cong Cao, Mengia S. Rioult-Pedotti, Paolo Migani, Crystal J. Yu, Rakesh Tiwari, Keykavous Parang, Mark R. Spaller, Dennis J. Goebel, John Marshall

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

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Angelman syndrome (AS) is a neurodevelopment disorder characterized by severe cognitive impairment and a high rate of autism. AS is caused by disrupted neuronal expression of the maternally inherited Ube3A ubiquitin protein ligase, required for the proteasomal degradation of proteins implicated in synaptic plasticity, such as the activity-regulated cytoskeletal-associated protein (Arc/Arg3.1). Mice deficient in maternal Ube3A express elevated levels of Arc in response to synaptic activity, which coincides with severely impaired long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampus and deficits in learning behaviors. In this study, we sought to test whether elevated levels of Arc interfere with brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) …

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The Neural Substrates Of Complex Argument Structure Representations: Processing “Alternating Transitivity” Verbs, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, Julia Schuchard, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Cynthia K. Thompson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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This study examines the neural correlates of processing verbal entries with multiple argument structures using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We compared brain activation in response to “alternating transitivity” verbs, corresponding to two different verbal alternates—one transitive and one intransitive—and simple verbs, with only one, intransitive, thematic grid. Fourteen young healthy participants performed a lexical decision task with the two verb types. Results showed significantly greater activation in the angular and supramarginal gyri (Brodmann areas (BAs) 39 and 40) extending to the posterior superior and middle temporal gyri bilaterally, for alternating compared to simple verbs. Additional activation was detected in …

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Increasing Parity Is Associated With Cumulative Effects On Memory, Laura M. Glynn

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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BACKGROUND: The purpose of this investigation was to determine if reproductive experience is associated with cumulative effects on human memory performance during pregnancy and if these effects persist into the postpartum period.

METHODS: Verbal recall memory performance was assessed in 254 women four times during pregnancy and at 3 months postpartum. The relation between parity and memory function was evaluated with hierarchical linear modeling and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA).

RESULTS: The data indicate that the previously documented adverse effects of pregnancy on memory performance are compounded with successive pregnancies. During gestation and postpartum, multiparity was associated with poorer memory function, …

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Spiking Patterns And Their Functional Implications In The Antennal Lobe Of The Tobacco Hornworm Manduca Sexta, Hong Lei, Carolina E. Reisenman, Caroline H. Wilson, Prasad Gabbur, John G. Hildebrand

Health Sciences and Kinesiology Faculty Articles

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Bursting as well as tonic firing patterns have been described in various sensory systems. In the olfactory system, spontaneous bursts have been observed in neurons distributed across several synaptic levels, from the periphery, to the olfactory bulb (OB) and to the olfactory cortex. Several in vitro studies indicate that spontaneous firing patterns may be viewed as “fingerprints” of different types of neurons that exhibit distinct functions in the OB. It is still not known, however, if and how neuronal burstiness is correlated with the coding of natural olfactory stimuli. We thus conducted an in vivo study to probe this question …

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Network Modulation During Complex Syntactic Processing, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Dorothee Saur, Wolfgang Mader, Björn Schelter, Sladjana Lukic, Eisha Wali, Jens Timmer, Cynthia K. Thompson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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Complex sentence processing is supported by a left-lateralized neural network including inferior frontal cortex and posterior superior temporal cortex. This study investigates the pattern of connectivity and information flow within this network. We used fMRI BOLD data derived from 12 healthy participants reported in an earlier study (Thompson, C. K., Den Ouden, D. B., Bonakdarpour, B., Garibaldi, K., & Parrish, T. B. (2010b). Neural plasticity and treatment-induced recovery of sentence processing in agrammatism. Neuropsychologia, 48(11), 3211–3227) to identify activation peaks associated with object-cleft over syntactically less complex subject-cleft processing. Directed Partial Correlation Analysis was conducted on time series …

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Patterns Of Fetal Heart Rate Response At ∼30 Weeks Gestation Predict Size At Birth, C. Sandman, C. J. Cordova, E. P. Davis, Laura M. Glynn, C. Buss

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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There is evidence that fetal exposure to maternal stress is associated with adverse birth outcomes. Less is known about the association between fetal responses to a stressor and indicators of fetal maturity and developmental outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether fetal heart rate (FHR) patterns in response to a startling stimulus at ∼30 weeks of gestation were associated with gestational age at birth and birth weight. FHR was measured in 156 maternal–fetal dyads following a vibroacoustic stimulus. All pregnancies were singleton intrauterine pregnancies in English-speaking women who were primarily married, middle class, White and at …

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Neural Plasticity And Treatment-Induced Recovery Of Sentence Processing In Agrammatism, Cynthia K. Thompson, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Borna Bonakdarpour, Kyla Garibaldi, Todd B. Parrish

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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This study examined patterns of neural activation associated with treatment-induced improvement of complex sentence production (and comprehension) in six individuals with stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia, taking into account possible alterations in blood flow often associated with stroke, including delayed time-to-peak of the hemodynamic response function (HRF) and hypoperfused tissue. Aphasic participants performed an auditory verification fMRI task, processing object cleft, subject cleft, and simple active sentences, prior to and following a course of Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF; Thompson et al., 2003), a linguistically based approach for treating aphasic sentence deficits, which targeted object relative clause constructions. The patients also were …

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Distribution Of Allatostatin C-Like Immunoreactivity In The Central Nervous System Of The Copepod Crustacean Calanus Finmarchicus, Caroline H. Wilson, Andrew E. Christie

Health Sciences and Kinesiology Faculty Articles

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The C-type allatostatins (C-ASTs) are a family of highly pleiotropic arthropod neuropeptides. In crustaceans, transcriptomic/mass spectral studies have identified C-ASTs in the nervous systems of many species; the cellular distributions of these peptides remain unknown. Here, the distribution of C-AST was mapped in the nervous system of the copepod Calanus finmarchicus, the major contributor to the North Atlantic’s zooplanktonic biomass; C-AST-immunopositive neurons were identified in the protocerebrum, in several peripheral ganglia associated with feeding appendages, and in the ganglia controlling the swimming legs, with immunopositive axons present throughout the ventral nerve cord. In addition, axons innervating the dorsal longitudinal …

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Neuroimaging And Recovery Of Language In Aphasia, Cynthia K. Thompson, Dirk B. Den Ouden

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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The use of functional neuroimaging techniques has advanced what is known about the neural mechanisms used to support language processing in aphasia resulting from brain damage. This paper highlights recent findings derived from neuroimaging studies focused on neuroplasticity of language networks, the role of the left and right hemispheres in this process, and studies examining how treatment affects the neurobiology of recovery. We point out variability across studies as well as factors related to this variability, and we emphasize challenges that remain for research.

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Argument Structure Effects In Action Verb Naming In Static And Dynamic Conditions, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Steve Fix, Todd B. Parrish, Cynthia K. Thompson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

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Argument structure, as in the participant roles entailed within the lexical representation of verbs, affects verb processing. Recent neuroimaging studies show that when verbs are heard or read, the posterior temporoparietal region shows increased activation for verbs with greater versus lesser argument structure complexity, usually bilaterally. In addition, patients with agrammatic aphasia show verb production deficits, graded based on argument structure complexity. In the present study, we used fMRI to examine the neural correlates of verb production in overt action naming conditions. In addition, we tested the differential effects of naming when verbs were presented dynamically in video segments versus …

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Three-Dimensional Arm Movements At Constant Equi-Affine Speed, Frank E. Pollick, Uri Maoz, Amir A. Handzel, Peter J. Giblin, Guillermo Sapiro, Tamar Flash

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

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It has long been acknowledged that planar hand drawing movements conform to a relationship between movement speed and shape, such that movement speed is inversely proportional to the curvature to the power of one-third. Previous literature has detailed potential explanations for the power-law’s existence as well as systematic deviations from it. However, the case of speed-shape relations for three-dimensional (3D) drawing movements has remained largely unstudied. In this paper we first derive a generalization of the planar power law to 3D movements, which is based on the principle that this power law implies motion at constant equi-affine speed. This generalization …

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