Front Hum Neurosci
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Nissim, a 64 years old Hebrew-speaking man who sustained an ischemic infarct in the left occipital lobe, exhibited an intriguing pattern. He could hold a deep and fluent conversation about abstract and complex issues, such as the social risks in unemployment, but failed to retrieve imageable words such as ball, spoon, carrot, or giraffe. A detailed study of the words he could and could not retrieve, in tasks of picture naming, tactile naming, and naming to definition, indicated that whereas he was able to retrieve abstract words, he had severe difficulties when trying to retrieve imageable words. ⋯ His visual perception as well as his phonological input and output lexicons and buffers (assessed by auditory lexical decision, word and sentence repetition, and writing to dictation) were intact, supporting a selective conceptual system impairment. He was able to retrieve gestures for objects and pictures he saw, indicating that his access to concepts often sufficed for the activation of the motoric information but did not suffice for access to the entry in the semantic lexicon. These results show that imageable concepts can be selectively impaired, and shed light on the organization of conceptual-semantic system.
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Becoming aware of errors that one has committed might be crucial for strategic behavioral and neuronal adjustments to avoid similar errors in the future. This review addresses conscious error perception ("error awareness") in healthy subjects as well as the relationship between error awareness and neurological and psychiatric diseases. We first discuss the main findings on error awareness in healthy subjects. ⋯ In addition to cytoarchitectonic and connectivity data, this reflects a functional and structural gradient within the insula from anterior to posterior. Furthermore, studies dealing with error awareness and lack of insight in a number of psychiatric diseases are reported. Especially in schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) the performance monitoring system seems impaired, thus conscious error perception might be altered.
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Anxiety can be distracting, disruptive, and incapacitating. Despite problems with empirical replication of this phenomenon, one fruitful avenue of study has emerged from working memory (WM) experiments where a translational method of anxiety induction (risk of shock) has been shown to disrupt spatial and verbal WM performance. Performance declines when resources (e.g., spatial attention, executive function) devoted to goal-directed behaviors are consumed by anxiety. ⋯ Anxiety impacts both verbal and spatial processes, as described by correlations between anxiety and performance impairment, albeit the effect on spatial WM is consistent across load. Demanding WM tasks may exert top-down control over higher-order cortical resources engaged by anxious apprehension, however high-load spatial WM may continue to experience additional competition from anxiety-related changes in spatial attention, resulting in impaired performance. By describing this disruption across task modalities, these findings inform current theories of emotion-cognition interactions and may facilitate development of clinical interventions that seek to target cognitive impairments associated with anxiety.
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Increasing evidence supports the notion that pain-related fear plays a key role in the transition from acute to chronic pain. Recent experimental data show that associative learning processes are involved in the acquisition of pain-related fear. An intriguing yet underinvestigated question entails how spreading of pain-related fear in chronic pain occurs. ⋯ This is the first study to demonstrate a generalization gradient of cued pain-related fear. However, this effect was only present in the startle eyeblink responses, but not in the verbal ratings. Taken together, this paradigm represents a novel tool to scrutinize the largely understudied phenomenon of the spreading of fear and avoidance in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain and mapping possible pathological differences in generalization gradients and the spreading of pain in patients as compared with healthy controls.
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The use of intracarotid propofol procedure (IPP) when assessing musical lateralization has not been reported in literature up to now. This procedure (similar to Wada Test) has provided the opportunity to investigate not only lateralization of language and memory functions on epileptic patients but also offers a functional mapping approach with superior spatial and temporal resolution to analyze the lateralization of musical abilities. Findings in literature suggest that musical training modifies functional and structural brain organization. ⋯ At one-year follow-up, outcome was excellent with respect to seizures and professional skills, meanwhile cognitive abilities improved. These findings indicate that IPP helps to predict who might be at risk for postoperative musical, language, and memory deficits after epilepsy surgery. Our research suggests that musical expertise and epilepsy critically modifies long-term memory processes and induces brain structural and functional plasticity.