Neuroscience
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The present study investigated whether different types of motor imageries can be classified based on the location of the activation peaks or the multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and compared the difference between visual motor imagery (VI) and kinesthetic motor imagery (KI). During fMRI scanning sessions, 25 participants imagined four movements included in the Motor Imagery Questionnaire-Revised (MIQ-R): knee lift, jump, arm movement, and waist bend. ⋯ Our results show that the imagined movements can be classified using both the location of the activation peak and the spatial activation patterns within the sensorimotor cortex, and MVPA performs better than the activation peak classification. Furthermore, our result reveals that the KI group achieved a higher MVPA decoding accuracy within the left primary somatosensory cortex than the VI group, suggesting that the modality of motor imagery differently affects the classification performance in distinct brain regions.
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Swimming training (ST) can mitigate functional disorders in neurological diseases, but the effect and mechanism of ST in improving the neurological function of intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH) have not been reported. Our study aimed to explore the protective effect of early ST on ICH mice and its relationship with the serine-threonine kinase (Akt)/glycogen synthase kinase 3β (GSK3β) pathway. Our findings showed that the ICH model mice had poor behavioural manifestations in the Y maze test and open field test compared to the ST group and sham group. ⋯ Furthermore, the Akt kinase inhibitor GSK690693 exacerbated neurological impairment, increased the expression of Iba1, GFAP and Bax/Bcl-2, and reversed the anti-apoptotic effects and anti-glia activation of ST, which was associated with the inhibition of p-Akt/Akt and p-GSK3β/GSK3β expression. These results indicated that the protective role of ST in ICH was mediated via the Akt/GSK3β pathway. In conclusion, ST displayed neuroprotection by inhibiting apoptosis and glial activation in ICH mice by activating the Akt/GSK3β signalling pathway.
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During speech comprehension, the ongoing context of a sentence is used to predict sentence outcome by limiting subsequent word likelihood. Neurophysiologically, violations of context-dependent predictions result in amplitude modulations of the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component. While the N400 is widely used to measure semantic processing and integration, no publicly-available auditory stimulus set is available to standardize approaches across the field. ⋯ With 20 neurotypical adults, we validated that this set elicits robust N400's, as well as two additional semantically-related ERP components: the recognition potential (∼ 250 ms) and the late positivity component (∼ 600 ms). This stimulus set (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9ghx3ffkg) and the 20 high-density (128-channel) electrophysiological datasets (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6wwpzgmx4) are made publicly available to promote data sharing and reuse. Future studies that use this stimulus set to investigate sentential semantic comprehension in both control and clinical populations may benefit from the increased comparability and reproducibility within this field of research.