Human motor activity possesses fractal structures as characterized by similar fluctuation patterns across multiple time scales from seconds to hours. Such fractal regulation (FR) is robust in healthy young subjects and is degraded with aging. Our recent...

Converging evidence from electrophysiological, neuropsychological, and brain imaging studies has implicated a frontal-parietal network of brain regions involved in controlling how attention is allocated in space. What remains to be understood is which portions of this network support specific mental operations that are under the broad umbrella of “attention control”. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify which subregions of the attentional control network are involved in high-level interpretation of cue information by systematically varying discriminability of attention-directing cues while holding the shifting of attention signaled by the cues constant. The cues consisted of a line located on either side of fixation; the longer line indicated to which field attention should be directed. Discriminability of the cues was manipulated by varying the difference in length of the two lines. After 1500ms, bilateral targets briefly appea...

Neural oscillations at ∼10 Hz, called alpha oscillations, are one of the most prominent components of neural oscillations in the human brain. In recent years, characteristics (power/frequency/phase) of occipital alpha oscillations have been correlated with various perceptual phenomena. However, the relationship between inter-individual differences in alpha oscillatory characteristics and the properties of the underlying brain structures, such as white matter pathways, is unclear. A possibility is that intrinsic occipital alpha oscillations are mediated by thalamocortical interaction; we hypothesized that the most promising candidate for characterizing the intrinsic alpha oscillation is optic radiation (OR), which is the geniculo-cortical pathway carrying signals between the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and primary visual cortex (V1). We used resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) and diffusion-weighted/quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (dMRI/qMRI) to correlate the frequency and power of...

Although a large number of classifiers have been developed to discriminate schizophrenia from healthy controls using whole brain resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), it is not clear whether the classifiers generalize to different countries, MRI scann...

Introduction The Anti-inflammatory drug alpha melanocyte stimulating hormone (α-MSH) can reduce the level of pro-inflammatory cytokines during global brain ischemia. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the neuroprotection effects of α-MSH ...

Neuropsychological studies of humans and monkeys have provided evidence that the damage to the prefrontal cortex impairs the ability to discriminate the order of events sequentially presented during recency judgment paradigms. Previous neuroimaging studies investigated the temporal-order memory by contrasting it with item memory, and revealed that frontal activation was stronger during the temporal-order memory than during the item memory. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study explored the precise neural correlates of the temporal-order retrieval per se using an intra-paradigm comparison within a recency judgment paradigm. In this paradigm, after subjects studied a list of words sequentially, they were presented with two of the studied words simultaneously and were asked which of the two words were studied more recently. Two types of such retrieval trials with varied amount of demands for the recency judgment were intermixed and compared using event-related fMRI. The comparison of ...

Young adult binge-drinkers represent a model for the examination of endophenotypic risk factors for alcohol misuse and early exposure to repeated binge cycles. Chronic or harmful alcohol use leads to neurochemical, structural and morphological neuroplas...

Objective: Affective symptoms often occur within the first days after smoking cessation and facilitate the risk to relapse. However, neural underpinnings of these cessation-related changes in mood are not well understood. Methods: We investigated nicoti...

The Epilepsy Bioinformatics Study for Antiepileptogenic Therapy (EpiBioS4Rx) is an ongoing, international, multicenter Center without Walls investigating translational biomarkers of epileptogenesis in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients and a preclini...

Introduction The amygdala plays a central role in processing socio-emotional information and thus has been featured prominently in some pathophysiological models of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Nevertheless, findings have been mixed regarding ASD-rel...