Background. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) effectively reduces motor symptoms in most patients with Parkinson disease (PD), yet also may produce untoward effects. Investigation of DBS effects requires accurate localization...

Childhood abuse is increasingly linked to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a mental affliction which follows abuse survivors into adulthood. All subjects were right handed women between the ages of 20 and 40 who fit into one of three groups: 1. History of childhood abuse resulting in PTSD, 2. History of childhood abuse not resulting in PTSD, and 3. No history of abuse. Each subject was screened for trauma history and personality disorders using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, Trauma Symptoms Inventory, and Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory: Third Edition. Each subject was clinically interviewed to confirm group assignment and given the Weschler Memory Scales, Wonderlic Personnel Test (IQ), and a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of her brain. Subjects were demographically matched into triads based on group assignment, age, education, and use of alcohol, nicotine, and prescription medications. While there were no significant differences between groups demographically, women in Group 1 demon...

Background: Tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), present as significant cognitive decline accompanied by irreversible and severe brain atrophy. The underlying neuronal dysfunction causing these symptoms often occur years before clinical AD d...

Traumatic brain injury is defined mild (mTBI) when patients have loss of consciousness less than 30 minutes, Glasgow Coma Scale score of 13-15 and post-traumatic amnesia less than 24 hours. Traumatic brain damages can alter different structural compartm...

Nursing has reciprocal benefits for both mother and infant, helping to promote maternal behavior and bonding. To test the “rewarding” nature of nursing, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to map brain activity in lactating dams exposed to their suckling pups versus cocaine. Suckling stimulation in lactating dams and cocaine exposure in virgin females activated the dopamine reward system. In contrast, lactating dams exposed to cocaine instead of pups showed a suppression of brain activity in the reward system. These data support the notion that pup stimulation is more reinforcing than cocaine, underscoring the importance of pup seeking over other rewarding stimuli during lactation.

The complex environment we live in makes it necessary to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information constantly and reliably. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neural substrate underlying the selection of task-relevant information. We devised a new paradigm in which participants had to switch between two different tasks that were instructed by task cues. The task cues had a relevant and an irrelevant cue dimension. In congruent trials, both cue dimensions indicated the same task; in incongruent trials, they indicated different tasks; and in neutral trials, only the relevant dimension indicated a task. By comparing trials in which both cue dimensions were informative (congruent and incongruent trials) with trials in which only the relevant dimension was informative (neutral trials), we were able to show that the lateral prefrontal cortex and a region in the intraparietal sulcus are involved in the selection of task-relevant information. Furthermore, the present paradigm allows the inf...

The goal of this study was to examine the neural correlates of the maturation of working memory. We compared neural activity during working memory task performance between children (8-12 years old) and young adults. Previous investigations of young adults have demonstrated hemispheric asymmetries in the organization of verbal and spatial memory. Verbal working memory tasks are frequently related to activation in Broca's area, supplementary motor cortex, premotor cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and parietal cortex of the left hemisphere. Spatial working memory, however, predominately activates homologous regions of the right hemisphere. Older adults, who have reduced working memory capacity, show less asymmetry than young adults. A question of interest, therefore, was whether children would also show reduced asymmetry. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data from adults and children using a 3 Tesla GE scanner in a Sternber...

In this study, a well established expectancy manipulation model was combined with a novel placebo intervention, a validated sham acupuncture needle, to investigate the brain network involved in placebo analgesia. Sixteen subjects completed the experiment. We found that after placebo acupuncture treatment, subjective pain rating reduction (pre minus post) on the placebo-treated side was significantly greater than on the control side. When we calculated the contrast that subtracts the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal difference between post-treatment and pretreatment during pain application on placebo side from the same difference on control side [e.g., placebo (post – pre) – control (post – pre)], significant differences were observed in the bilateral rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), lateral prefrontal cortex, right anterior insula, supramarginal gyrus, and left inferior parietal lobule. The simple regression (correlation) analysis between each subject's fMRI signal difference of...

Adjustment of response threshold for speed compared with accuracy instructions in two-choice decision-making tasks is associated with activation in the fronto-striatal network, including the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and striatum ([Forstmann et al., 2008][1]). In contrast, increased response conservativeness is associated with activation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) ([Frank et al., 2007][2]). We investigated the involvement of these regions in trial-by-trial adjustments of response threshold in humans, using a cued-trials task-switching paradigm. Fully and partially informative switch cues produced more conservative thresholds than repeat cues. Repeat cues were associated with higher activation in pre-SMA and striatum than switch cues. For all cue types, individual variability in response threshold was associated with activation level in pre-SMA, with higher activation linked to lower threshold setting. In the striatum, this relationship was found for repeat cues only. These findings suppo...

Information integration across different sensory modalities contributes to object recognition, the generation of associations and long-term memory representations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation to investigate the presence of sensory integrative effects at cortical levels as early as nonprimary auditory and extrastriate visual cortices, which are implicated in intermediate stages of object processing. Stimulation consisted of an adapting audiovisual stimulus S1 and a subsequent stimulus S2 from the same basic-level category (e.g., cat). The stimuli were carefully balanced with respect to stimulus complexity and semantic congruency and presented in four experimental conditions: (1) the same image and vocalization for S1 and S2, (2) the same image and a different vocalization, (3) different images and the same vocalization, or (4) different images and vocalizations. This two-by-two factorial design allowed us to assess the contributions of auditory and visual stimulus repetiti...