The aim of this investigation was to identify neural systems supporting the processing of intentional and unintentional transgressions of social norms. Using event-related fMRI, we addressed this question by comparing neural responses to stories describing normal behaviour, embarrassing situations or violations of social norms. Processing transgressions of social norms involved systems previous...

BACKGROUND Many older adults in the US prefer to live independently for as long as they are able, despite the onset of conditions such as frailty and dementia. Solutions are needed to enable independent living, while enhancing safety and peace of mind for their families. Elderly patients are particularly at-risk for late assessment of cognitive changes. OBJECTIVES We predict early signs of il...

Tinnitus is highly complex, diverse, and difficult to treat, in part due to the fact that the underlying causes and mechanisms remain elusive. Tinnitus is generated within the auditory brain; however, consolidating our understanding of tinnitus pathophysiology is difficult due to the diversity of reported effects and the variety of implicated brain nuclei. Here, we focus on the inferior collicu...

Natural rewards and drugs of abuse can alter dopamine signaling, and ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopaminergic neurons are known to fire action potentials tonically or phasically under different behavioral conditions. However, without technology to control specific neurons with appropriate temporal precision in freely behaving mammals, the causal role of these action potential patterns in drivi...

PURPOSE To examine factors contributing to eye-hand coordination deficits in children with amblyopia and impaired stereovision. METHODS Participants were 55 anisometropic or strabismic children aged 5.0 to 9.25 years with different degrees of amblyopia and abnormal binocularity, along with 28 age-matched visually-normal controls. Pilot data were obtained from four additional patients studied ...

PURPOSE Electrical stimulation of retinal neurons has been shown to be a feasible way to elicit visual percepts in patients blind from retinal degenerations. The EPIRET3 retinal implant is the first completely wireless intraocular implant for epiretinal stimulation. Stimulation tests have been performed during a clinical trial that was carried out at the eye clinics of Aachen and Essen to evalu...

Four emotionally arousing stimuli were used to probe the behavior of monkeys with bilateral ablations of the entorhinal and perirhinal cortex. The animals’ behavioral changes were then contrasted with those observed earlier (Meunier et al., 1999) in monkeys with either neurotoxic or aspiration lesions of the neighboring amygdala. Rhinal cortex ablations yielded several subtle behavioral changes...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE It is generally considered that tissue that appears abnormal on T2 MRI is already infarcted and that any penumbra lies outside the T2-visible lesion. We investigated the distribution of infarcted tissue using proton spectroscopic MRI. METHODS In patients with symptoms of acute hemispheric ischemic stroke, imaged within a maximum of 3 days of stroke, we explored the dist...

PURPOSE To investigate the correlation of a structural measure of the macular area (optical coherence tomography (OCT)) with two functional measures (10-2 Humphrey visual field (HVF) and multifocal visual evoked potential (mfVEP)) of macular function. METHODS 55 eyes with open-angle glaucoma were enrolled. The 10-2 HVF was defined as abnormal if clusters of > or =3 points with p<5%, one of wh...