BACKGROUND This study tested the hypothesis that microstructural white matter abnormalities in frontostriatal-limbic tracts are associated with poor response inhibition on the Stroop task in depressed elders. METHOD Fifty-one elders with major depression participated in a 12-week escitalopram trial. Diffusion tensor imaging was used to determine fractional anisotropy (FA) in white matter regi...

Background: Cognitive impairment profoundly influences on older adults’ activities and quality of life. Therefore, optimizing and remediating age-associated cognitive decline have great importance. Objectives: To evaluate the effect of 8 weeks (3 day /week) computer based brain training on cognitive performance in old women with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Materials and Methods...

While much research on adolescent risk behaviour has focused on the development of prefrontal self-regulatory mechanisms, prior studies have elicited mixed evidence of a relationship between individual differences in the capacity for self-regulation and individual differences in risk taking. To explain these inconsistent findings, it has been suggested that the capacity for self-regulation may ...

Load theory predicts that concurrent cognitive load impairs selective attention. For visual stimuli, it has been shown that this impairment can be selective: Distraction was specifically increased when the stimulus material used in the cognitive load task matches that of the selective attention task. Here, we report four experiments that demonstrate such selective load effects for auditory sele...

Abundant behavioral evidence suggests that the ability to self-control is limited, and that any exertion of self-control will increase the likelihood of subsequent self-control failures. Here we investigated the neural correlates underlying the aftereffects of self-control on future control processes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An initial act of self-control (suppressing...

Research by Raz and his associates has repeatedly found that suggestions for hypnotic agnosia, administered to highly hypnotizable subjects, reduce or even eliminate Stroop interference. The present paper sought unsuccessfully to extend these findings to negative priming in the Stroop task. Nevertheless, the reduction of Stroop interference has broad theoretical implications, both for our under...

Previous studies show Stroop effect is stronger in the right visual field. However, (1) whether the lateralization patterns of two aspects of Stroop effects, facilitation and inhibition, for native Chinese speakers are similar to each other, and (2) whether secondary interference tasks modulate Stroop effect as in the studies about the lateralized Whorf effect, are remaining open questions. We ...

Nightmare disorder is a prevalent parasomnia characterized by vivid and highly unpleasant dream experiences during night time sleep. The neural background of disturbed dreaming was proposed to be associated with impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning during REM sleep. We hypothesized that the impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning in subjects with frequent nightmares would...