Blinks occur frequently in normal life and have increasingly been linked to perceptual and cognitive effects. However, some aspects of the oculomotor mechanics of blink-related eye movements remain unclear. Blink-related retraction of the eyeball has be...

Response inhibition is a core executive function enabling adaptive behaviour in dynamic environments. Human and animal models indicate that inhibitory control and control networks are modulated by noradrenaline, arising from the locus coeruleus. The integrity (i.e., cellular density) of the locus coeruleus noradrenergic system can be estimated from magnetization transfer sensitive magnetic resonance imaging, in view of neuromelanin present in noradrenergic neurons of older adults. Noradrenergic psychopharmacological studies indicate noradrenergic modulation of prefrontal and frontostriatal stopping-circuits in association with behavioural change. Here we test the noradrenergic hypothesis of inhibitory control, in healthy adults. We predicted that locus coeruleus integrity is associated with age-adjusted variance in response inhibition, mediated by changes in connectivity between frontal inhibitory control regions. In a preregistered analysis, we used magnetization transfer MRI images from N=63 healthy huma...

Introduction Identification of the epileptogenic network is crucial for planning surgical interventions in patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy. The epileptogenic networks are defined by a network of brain regions involved in the production of ep...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a prevalent cause of severe disorders, including post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE). PTE is diagnosed if seizures occur at least one week post-TBI, though they can emerge even in years after a TBI (Diaz-Arrastia et al., 2009)....

Vascular dysfunction is increasingly recognized in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and measures of vascular dysfunction can be evaluated using cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and imaging-based biomarker approaches. A clinical need exists to i...

Marmoset is a highly vocal and social New-World monkey of growing interest in neuroscience. It has unique advantages as a non-human primate model for studying neural mechanisms underlying vocal communication and brain functions for social interactions. ...

Objective: The mesencephalic locomotor region (MLR) is a target of interest to generate locomotion with deep brain stimulation (DBS) after spinal cord injury (SCI). Testing efficacy of DBS in a large animal model is an important translational step. We d...

Neurons meet much of their energy demand through aerobic metabolism. CMRO2 (cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption) is therefore a more direct measure of neuronal activation than BOLD (blood oxygenation-level dependent) contrast, which relies on ...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a brain stimulation technique that involves passing a powerful and rapidly changing current through a coil that is placed on the scalp. The induced magnetic field passes unimpeded through the skull and transiently disrupts neural circuitry. TMS is an emerging technology which is being used to investigate a wide range of behavioral phenomena, including motor control, visual processing and memory. Although functional MRI guidance and infrared tracking have improved the localization of TMS, the strength and distribution of the induced magnetic fields have not yet been accurately characterized. To localize the magnetic field of a 110mm double-cone TMS coil, we imaged a water-filled spherical phantom with TMS application in 3 orthogonal planes in a 0.5 T open MR scanner. A standard 2D fast gradient echo sequence was used to obtain images of phase evolution due to application of a constant 50 mA current to the TMS coil (TE = 7.8 and 8.8 ms, TR = 150 ms, voxel size ~ 3 m...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) are two noninvasive methods commonly used to study neural mechanisms supporting visual attention in humans. Studies using these tools, which have complementary spatial and temporal resolutions, implicitly assume they index similar underlying neural modulations related to external stimulus and internal attentional manipulations. Accordingly, they are often used interchangeably for constraining understanding about the impact of bottom-up and top-down factors on neural modulations. To test this core assumption, we simultaneously manipulated bottom-up sensory inputs by varying stimulus contrast and top-down cognitive modulations by changing the focus of spatial attention. Each of the male and female subjects participated in both fMRI and EEG sessions performing the same experimental paradigm. We found categorically different patterns of attentional modulation on fMRI activity in early visual cortex and early stimulus-evoked potential...