An exciting advancement in neuroscience over the past several decades has been the development of methods to acquire in vivo structural and functional data at the whole brain level, thus fostering a greater understanding of brain function in health and ...

Previous research has shown that training a visuo-motor task with one limb results in performance improvements of the untrained contra-lateral limb (Pan & Van Gemmert, 2013). The performance improvements have been shown to be often asymmetrical, i.e., a...

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 ...

It is a fundamental question whether the medial temporal lobe (MTL) supports only long-term memory encoding, or contributes to working memory (WM) processes as well. Recent data suggest that the MTL is activated whenever multiple items or item features are being maintained in WM. This may rely on interactions between the MTL or the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and content-specific areas in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex. Here, we investigated the neural mechanism through which the MTL, PFC, and IT cortex interact during WM maintenance. First, we quantified phase synchronization of intracranial EEG data in epilepsy patients with electrodes in both regions. Second, we used directional coupling analysis to study whether oscillatory activity in the IT cortex drives the MTL or vice versa. Finally, we investigated functional connectivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging data of healthy subjects with seeds in the MTL and PFC. With increasing load, EEG phase synchronization between the IT cortex and anterior...

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption is a shared feature for several neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s. Impairments in the assembly of tight junctions (TJ) between adjacent brain endothelial cells along with neuroinflammat...

Introduction. The pupil size can inform about arousal or attention. Animal studies have combined pupillometry with electrophysiology and behavior to infer arousal linked to neuronal firing patterns from specific locations. Whole-brain functional magneti...

The 5HT2C/2A agonist lorcaserin has been shown to attenuate the abuse-related behavioral effects of drugs of abuse; however, little is known about its underlying neural mechanisms. The present study aimed to determine the neural correlates of lorcaserin...

Creating focal brain lesions is an essential technique to investigate the function of a specific brain area. Because of the anatomical resemblance to the human brain and the ability to perform advanced cognitive tasks, non-human primates (NHPs) subjecte...

Non-heme intracellular iron is critical to normal cellular function, however it is also a powerful oxidizer that creates reactive oxygen species. Aging is often associated with iron accumulation in subcortical brain structures, which disrupts cellular f...

Human T-cell lymphoma invasion and metastasis 2 (TIAM2), a member of the guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) family, physiologically exists either in a long or short transcripts. The protein translated from short-TIAM2 mRNA (TIAM2S) has been noted ...