Neuropsychologia最新文献

Despite the growing interest in understanding creativity-the ability to produce novel and useful ideas-most research in the field focuses on examining the neural networks underlying creativity in isolated individuals. However, numerous creative breakthroughs in arts, sciences, and industries occur through social interactions, where ideas are generated collaboratively by dyads and groups. The accumulating evidence indicates that cooperative settings foster higher levels of creativity compared to individual settings, suggesting that social factors play a role in creativity.In this review, we synthesize the findings on individual and group creativity and propose a new brain model for understanding group creativity. We extend the twofold model of creativity and suggest that creativity in social setting involves an interplay between idea generation, social influence and flexibility. Building on this model we suggest that group creativity is mediated by activity as well as interbrain coupling in neural circuits associated with associative thinking (default mode network), flexibility (executive control network) and observation-execution (inferior frontal gyrus). By shifting the focus from isolated individuals to social settings, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of creativity and its neural mechanisms. This research direction holds the potential to uncover valuable insights into how group dynamics and social interactions facilitate the generation of creative ideas.

Alpha oscillations are proposed to serve the function of inhibition to protect items in working memory from intruding information. In a modified Sternberg paradigm, alpha power was initially found to increase at the anticipation of strong compared to weak distractors, reflecting the active gating of distracting information from interfering with the memory trace. However, there was a lack of evidence supporting the inhibition account of alpha oscillations in later studies using similar experimental design with greater temporal disparity between the encoding phase and the presentation of the distractors. This temporal disparity might have dampened the demands for inhibition. To test the hypothesis that alpha inhibition takes place when distractors are temporally close to the encoding phase, here we designed a modified Sternberg paradigm where distractors were sandwiched between targets in the encoding phase to ensure that they compete for working memory resources. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we replicated the finding that alpha power increased for strong compared to weak distractors. The effect was present throughout the encoding phase, not only upon the presentation of distractors but also before and after the presentation of distractors, providing evidence for both proactive and reactive inhibition of distractors at the neuronal level. Meanwhile, the effect was restricted to the context of high but not low target-to-distractor ratio. The results suggest that the distractors being temporally close to the encoding phase of more targets might be a boundary condition of the generation of alpha oscillations for gating.

View symmetry has been suggested to be an important intermediate representation between view-specific and view-invariant representations of faces in the human brain. Here, we compared view-symmetry in humans and a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) trained to recognise faces. First, we compared the output of the DCNN to head rotations in yaw (left-right), pitch (up-down) and roll (in-plane rotation). For yaw, an initial view-specific representation was evident in the convolutional layers, but a view-symmetric representation emerged in the fully-connected layers. Consistent with a role in the recognition of faces, we found that view-symmetric responses to yaw were greater for same identity compared to different identity faces. In contrast, we did not find a similar transition from view-specific to view-symmetric representations in the DCNN for either pitch or roll. These findings suggest that view-symmetry emerges when opposite rotations of the head lead to mirror images. Next, we compared the view-symmetric patterns of response to yaw in the DCNN with corresponding behavioural and neural responses in humans. We found that responses in the fully-connected layers of the DCNN correlated with judgements of perceptual similarity and with the responses of higher visual regions. These findings suggest that view-symmetric representations may be computationally efficient way to represent faces in humans and artificial neural networks for the recognition of identity.

Visualization software is a critical component at every stage of neuroimaging research. It enables researchers to inspect raw or processed datasets for artifacts, to identify anomalies, to verify the accuracy of automated processing, and to interpret the location of statistical results within the complex structure of the human brain. Since 2006, MRIcron has provided a free, open-source, cross-platform tool designed to meet these needs. Despite its minimal system requirements, MRIcron supports various popular neuroimaging file formats, ensuring compatibility with widely-used tools in the field, such as SPM, FreeSurfer, FSL, and AFNI. The intuitive graphical interface allows for straightforward image visualization and manipulation, while its advanced features such as lesion drawing and ability to handle many image formats cater to more sophisticated analyses. Furthermore, MRIcron's scripting capabilities enable users to automate complex workflows, facilitating the efficient processing of large datasets. In summary, MRIcron is a powerful and versatile tool that addresses the visualization and analysis needs of the neuroimaging community, contributing to the advancement of brain research by providing a reliable and efficient solution for brain imaging analysis. This article describes the development of MRIcron, from its inception to the present day.

Changes of the target-defining feature dimension have previously been shown to elicit anterior prefrontal activation increases. In the majority of studies, this change-related activation was observed in the left lateral frontopolar cortex. In at least one study, however, right anterior prefrontal activation was observed. Unlike previous work which typically used dense visual displays, the latter study employed sparse displays. Display density is known to affect search efficiency, such that dense displays give rise to efficient and sparse displays give rise to inefficient search. We reasoned that different neural processes might be involved in eliciting attentional dimension changes in efficient and inefficient search, so that variation of display density would change the laterality of dimension change-related activation in the anterior prefrontal cortex. We found that changes in the target-defining feature dimension selectively elicited right frontopolar activation during search in sparse displays, but not during search in dense displays, whereas the reverse pattern was observed in left frontopolar cortex. Our results demonstrate that different neural processes are at work during search in sparse and dense displays, resolving an apparent discrepancy in reported dimension change-related activation.

The underlying causes of reading impairment in neurodegenerative disease are not well understood. The current study seeks to determine the causes of surface alexia and phonological alexia in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and typical (amnestic) Alzheimer's disease (AD). Participants included 24 with the logopenic variant (lvPPA), 17 with the nonfluent/agrammatic variant (nfvPPA), 12 with the semantic variant (svPPA), 19 with unclassifiable PPA (uPPA), and 16 with AD. Measures of Surface Alexia and Phonological Alexia were computed by subtracting control-condition word reading accuracy from irregular word reading and pseudoword reading accuracy, respectively. Cases of Surface Alexia were common in svPPA, lvPPA, uPPA, and AD, but not in nfvPPA. At the subgroup level, average Surface Alexia was significantly higher in svPPA, lvPPA, and uPPA, compared to unimpaired age-matched controls. Cases of Phonological Alexia were common in nfvPPA, lvPPA, and uPPA, and average Phonological Alexia was significantly higher in these subgroups, compared to unimpaired age-matched controls. Behavioral regression results indicated that Surface Alexia can be predicted by impairment in the lexical-semantic processing of nouns, suggesting that a lexical-semantic deficit is required for the development of surface alexia, while cortical volume regression results indicated that Surface Alexia can be predicted by reduced volume in the left Superior Temporal Pole, which has been associated with conceptual-semantic processing. Behavioral regression results indicated that Phonological Alexia can be predicted by impairment on Pseudoword Repetition, suggesting that this type of reading difficulty may be due to impaired phonological processing. The cortical volume regression results suggested that Phonological Alexia can be predicted by reduced volume within the left Inferior Temporal Gyrus and the left Angular Gyrus, areas that are associated with lexical-semantic processing and phonological processing, respectively.

As an organizing framework for questions of mind and brain, I discuss how the brain builds and uses mental models. Mental models provide a complex, structured description of some situation in the world. The role of perception is to build such a model for the current environment; knowledge provides many of the building blocks; in episodic memory, a previous model is reinstated; in cognitive control, the model dictates a choice of action. A model, I suggest, is a compositional, whole brain state, combining information from multiple specialised brain systems into a structured description of entities in the model and their roles and relationships. The default mode network may play an organizational role as parts of a model are combined into a broader whole. The model combines an active attentional foreground with a more extensive, latent background. Foreground is based on active neural firing, orchestrated by the brain's multiple demand network. Background may also include low-intensity neural activity, but with a substantial contribution from both faster and slower aspects of synaptic change. Interplay between foreground and background underlies core aspects of cognition, including cognitive control, problem solving, abstraction, and learning. Together, these proposals suggest how integrated, whole-brain functions build mental models, providing a unifying framework for the diverse concerns of cognitive neuroscience.

In the search for the neural correlates of auditory consciousness, a candidate has been found using electroencephalography: the auditory awareness negativity (AAN). Earlier studies have investigated the AAN in response to lateralized sound. With headphones, there is a clear lateralization of AAN when two auditory lateralization cues are combined: the interaural level difference (ILD) and interaural time difference (ITD). To separate the contribution of these cues to a lateralized AAN, we tested three stimulus conditions with headphones: A combination of ILD and ITD, solely ITD, and monaural stimulation. Results suggest that ILD and ITD are required in conjunction for a lateralized AAN, and neither ITD nor monaural stimulation can yield a lateralized AAN. These results suggest that event-related potentials may be limited in measuring the lateralization of the neural correlates of auditory consciousness to lateralized sounds, depending on auditory cues and acoustic environment.

Humans have the spontaneous capacity to track the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. To investigate the neural correlates of this condition known as beat deafness, the cortical electric activity of ten beat-deaf adults, the largest cohort studied so far, as well as of 14 matched controls (Experiment 2), and 16 university students (Experiment 1) were examined. All were actively engaged in detecting anisochronous time-deviants in otherwise isochronous, metronome-like, sequences. As expected, participants with beat-deafness performed more poorly than controls; this behavioral impairment was accompanied by a reduced P300 component at the neurophysiological level, yet with intact N200. Additionally, the MMN following task-irrelevant intensity-deviants was not different between groups. Together the results suggest normal auditory predictions regarding upcoming tones but unreliable access to its representations. These results mirror the findings with pitch deviants in the pitch-based form of congenital amusia and provide a similar neural signature of the disorder on the pitch and time dimension.

Elite tennis players demonstrate an outstanding ability to predict the timing of their shots during matches, especially during prolonged rallies. Exploring the characteristics of this temporal perception advantage and its cognitive processing mechanisms may help explain the influence of sports experience on temporal perception abilities. We recruited 28 tennis athletes and 28 controls with no sports experience and measured their behavioral performance and brain neural activity characteristics using a time-to-contact paradigm under different temporal context conditions. The results indicated that in the time estimation task, tennis athletes had significantly smaller absolute bias and lower delayed response ratios than non-athlete controls. Performance of both groups in the timing task without a beat context was significantly better than that with a rhythmic context. During the timing process, the amplitude of the contingent negative variation (CNV) was most closely associated with the processing of temporal information, where tennis athletes were significantly greater than that of non-athletes. The CNV amplitude induced in the left brain area was significantly smaller than that in the midline brain area and the right brain area. Overall, we found that tennis players showed a distinct advantage in timing accuracy, characterized by earlier prediction preparation and higher utilization of temporal information.