Nature neuroscience
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Nature neuroscience · Dec 2012
Developmental pathways to amygdala-prefrontal function and internalizing symptoms in adolescence.
Early life stress (ELS) and function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis predict later psychopathology. Animal studies and cross-sectional human studies suggest that this process might operate through amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) circuitry implicated in the regulation of emotion. ⋯ For females, adolescent amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity was inversely correlated with concurrent anxiety symptoms but positively associated with depressive symptoms, suggesting differing pathways from childhood cortisol levels function through adolescent amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity to anxiety and depression. These data highlight that, for females, the effects of ELS and early HPA-axis function may be detected much later in the intrinsic processing of emotion-related brain circuits.
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Nature neuroscience · Dec 2012
Neural population partitioning and a concurrent brain-machine interface for sequential motor function.
Although brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) have focused largely on performing single-targeted movements, many natural tasks involve planning a complete sequence of such movements before execution. For these tasks, a BMI that can concurrently decode the full planned sequence before its execution may also consider the higher-level goal of the task to reformulate and perform it more effectively. ⋯ Such marked stability occurred because each subpopulation encoded either only currently held or only newly added target information irrespective of the exact sequence. On the basis of these findings, we developed a BMI that concurrently decodes a full motor sequence in advance of movement and can then accurately execute it as desired.