This study investigated the influence of direction of attention on the early detection of visual novelty, as indexed by the anterior N2. The anterior N2 was measured in young subjects (n=32) under an attend and an ignore condition. Subjects were presented standard, target/rare, and perceptually novel visual stimuli under both conditions, but under the ignore condition, attention was directed to...

Abstract Craniopharyngioma is a type of benign brain tumor that develops in the suprasellar region and can lead to long-term neurological, endocrine, visual impairments as well neurocognitive deficits resulting from its treatment. The contemporary treatment options for this are radical surgery or limited conjunction with radiotherapy. current understanding impact injury related such proton radi...

Working memory training has been the focus of intense research interest. Despite accumulating behavioral work, knowledge about the neural mechanisms underlying training effects is scarce. Here, we show that 7 days of training on an n-back task led to substantial performance improvements in the trained task; furthermore, the experimental group showed cross-modal transfer, as compared with an act...

Auditory graphs exploit pattern recognition in the auditory system, but questions remain about the relationship between cognitive abilities, demographics, and sonification interpretation. Subjects completed a magnitude estimation task relating sound dimensions to data dimensions. Subjects also completed a working memory task (2-back task) and a spatial reasoning task (Raven's Progressive Matric...

Mind wandering has been considered as a mental process that is either independent from the concurrent task or regulated like a secondary task. These accounts predict that the form of mind wandering (i.e., images or words) should be either unaffected by or different from the modality form (i.e., visual or auditory) of the concurrent task. Findings from this study challenge these accounts. We mea...

Although prefrontal cortex is clearly important in executive function, the specific processes carried out by particular regions within human prefrontal cortex remain a matter of debate. A rapidly growing corpus of functional imaging work now implicates various areas within prefrontal cortex in a wide range of "executive" tasks. Loss-of-function studies can help constrain the interpretation of s...

[Purpose] This study compared the coordination patterns of the trunk and pelvis in the transverse plane between healthy subjects and patients with chronic low back pain during an anterior load carriage task at various walking speeds. [Subjects] Ten healthy subjects and 10 patients with chronic low back pain performed an anterior carriage task with a load of 10% body weight at walking speeds of ...

We investigated effects of concurrent cognitive task difficulty (n-back) on the regularity of whole-body movements during treadmill walking in women and men from 3 age groups (20-30, 60-70, and 70-80 years old). Using principal component analysis of individual gait patterns, we separated main (regular) from residual (irregular) components of whole-body motion. Proportion of residual variance (R...

Although the thalamus is an important module in "pain networks," there are few studies of the effect of experimental pain upon thalamic oscillations. We have now examined the hypothesis that, during a series of painful cutaneous laser stimuli, thalamic signals will show stimulus-related gamma-band spectral activity, which is modulated by attention to vs. distraction from the painful stimulus. W...