The higher level cognitive function of planning was studied in a group of medicated Parkinson's disease patients and a group of matched control subjects, using a computerised version of Shallice's Tower of London task. Baseline measurement of the ability to execute a given plan of action, to generate low level strategies required for efficient searching, and spatial working memory capacity, all...

The functional neuroanatomy of executive function critically involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been established as a noninvasive tool for transient modulation of cortical function. Here, we examined the effects of tDCS of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on planning function by using the Tower of London task to evaluate perfor...

Depression is one of the main risk factors for suicide. However, little is known about the intricate relationships among depressive symptomatology in unipolar depression, suicide risk, and the characteristics of executive dysfunction in depressed patients. We compared 20 non-psychotic unipolar depressed suicide attempters to 20 matching depressed non-attempters and to 20 healthy controls to fur...

Toxicokinetic Modeling of the Combined Exposure to Toluene and n-Hexane in Rats and Humans: Nabeel ALI, et al. Département de médecine du travail et d’hygiène du milieu, Faculté de médecine, Université de Montréal—We studied the toxicokinetic fate of toluene (TOL) and n-hexane (HEX) in rats exposed to mixtures of these solvents by inhalation during 4 hours. We developed and validated a physiolo...

The underconnectivity theory of autism attributes the disorder to lower anatomical and functional systems connectivity between frontal and more posterior cortical processing. Here we review evidence for the theory and present a computational model of an executive functioning task (Tower of London) implementing the assumptions of underconnectivity. We make two modifications to a previous computa...

OBJECTIVE This article examines the association between fathers' alcohol problems and children's effortful control during the transition from middle childhood to early adolescence (fourth to sixth grade). Additionally, we examined the role of two potential moderators of this association, fathers' antisocial behavior and child gender. METHOD The sample consisted of 197 families (102 nonalcohol...