Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by deficits in social communication and restricted interests. Understanding the biological etiology of autism is critical for developing better diagnostic and treatment tools. Recently, studies using mac...

Strengthening of the neural connections within the hippocampus (HC) has been shown to support memory storage in animals, and damage to this region is classically associated with profound memory deficits in humans. In elderly adults, global HC volume is ...

Introduction: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a pattern of alcohol use that involves problems controlling their drinking. Craving appears to play an important role in compulsive use across addictive substances, predicting negative outcomes such as increas...

Expectation interacting with nociceptive input can shape the perception of pain. It has been suggested that reward-related expectations are associated with the activation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which projects to the striatum (e.g., nucleus accumbens [NAc]) and prefrontal cortex (e.g., rostral anterior cingulate cortex [rACC]). However, the role of these projection pathways in encoding expectancy effects on pain remains unclear. In this study, we leveraged a visual cue conditioning paradigm with a long pain anticipation period and collected magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from 30 healthy human subjects (14 females). At the within-subject level, whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) analyses showed that the mesocortical pathway (VTA-rACC FC) and the mesolimbic pathway (VTA-NAc FC) were enhanced with positive expectation but inhibited with negative expectation during pain anticipation period. Mediation analyses revealed that cue-based expectancy effects on pain were mainly mediated by t...

Alpha (8-12 Hz) oscillations and default mode network (DMN) activity dominate the brain’s intrinsic activity in the temporal and spatial domains, respectively. They are thought to play crucial roles in the spatiotemporal organization of the complex brain system. Relatedly, both have been implicated, often concurrently, in diverse neuropsychiatric disorders, with accruing electroencephalogram/magnetoencephalogram (EEG/MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data linking these two neural activities both at rest and during key cognitive operations. Prominent theories and extant findings thus converge to suggest a mechanistic relationship between alpha oscillations and the DMN. Here, we leveraged simultaneous EEG-fMRI data acquired before and after alpha-frequency transcranial alternating current stimulation ( α -tACS) and observed that α -tACS tightened the dynamic coupling between spontaneous fluctuations in alpha power and DMN connectivity (especially, in the posterior DMN, between the posteri...

Executive cognitive processes have been implicated in a wide variety of cognitive tasks, from maintenance of an item in working memory to selection of an infrequent response. The current study investigated whether working memory and response selection cues evoke transient activity in similar brain regions, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 4T. Subjects viewed a series of simple shapes (triangles and circles) presented one at a time in a rapid sequence, with each shape visible for 500ms with a 1000ms interstimulus interval. Most stimuli were black and task-irrelevant. On infrequent oddball trials (10%), the stimuli were blue and required a button press response, regardless of its shape. On encoding trials (5%), the stimuli were green and subjects remembered their shape. On subsequent retrieval trials (5%) presented in red, the subject pressed a button if the presented shape matched that on the previous encoding trial. The encoding and retrieval stimuli were separated by intervals of betw...

Introduction: Cranial radiation therapy (CRT) is one of the main contributing factors to long term neurocognitive deficits in survivors of pediatric cancers. The risk for and severity of these deficits are greater in female patients. CRT also induces ne...

Age-related slowing of information processing is widely cited as a primary causal factor in cognitive ageing. Age-related atrophy of white matter (WM) (Peters 2002) and grey matter (GM) (Wang et al. 2005) has been linked to slowing of neuronal responses...

With the present study we set the cornerstone for a systematic catalogue of spatio-temporal brain activity regimes generated with the connectome based brain simulation platform The Virtual Brain. For 50 structural connectomes from healthy adult human br...

Brain calcifications are observed in patients with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Down syndrome and Frontal temporal lobe dementia. Recent study shows that calcification lead to oxidative stress in astrocyte and its neurotoxic ...