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Alvaro Pascual-Leone
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2016) 28 (2): 275–281.
Published: 01 February 2016
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Dual tasking (e.g., walking or standing while performing a cognitive task) disrupts performance in one or both tasks, and such dual-task costs increase with aging into senescence. Dual tasking activates a network of brain regions including pFC. We therefore hypothesized that facilitation of prefrontal cortical activity via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) would reduce dual-task costs in older adults. Thirty-seven healthy older adults completed two visits during which dual tasking was assessed before and after 20 min of real or sham tDCS targeting the left pFC. Trials of single-task standing, walking, and verbalized serial subtractions were completed, along with dual-task trials of standing or walking while performing serial subtractions. Dual-task costs were calculated as the percent change in markers of gait and postural control and serial subtraction performance, from single to dual tasking. Significant dual-task costs to standing, walking, and serial subtraction performance were observed before tDCS ( p < .01). These dual-task costs were less after real tDCS as compared with sham tDCS as well as compared with either pre-tDCS condition ( p < .03). Further analyses indicated that tDCS did not alter single task performance but instead improved performance solely within dual-task conditions ( p < .02). These results demonstrate that dual tasking can be improved by modulating prefrontal activity, thus indicating that dual-task decrements are modifiable and may not necessarily reflect an obligatory consequence of aging. Moreover, tDCS may ultimately serve as a novel approach to preserving dual-task capacity into senescence.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2012) 24 (4): 775–777.
Published: 01 April 2012
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A central aim in cognitive neuroscience is to explain how neural activity gives rise to perception and behavior; the causal link of paramount interest is thus from brain to behavior. Functional neuroimaging studies, however, tend to provide information in the opposite direction by informing us how manipulation of behavior may affect neural activity. Although this may provide valuable insights into neuronal properties, one cannot use such evidence to make inferences about the behavioral significance of the observed activations; if A causes B, it does not necessarily follow that B causes A. In contrast, brain stimulation techniques enable us to directly modulate brain activity as the source of behavior and thus establish causal links.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2012) 24 (2): 276–286.
Published: 01 February 2012
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Confronted with the loss of one type of sensory input, we compensate using information conveyed by other senses. However, losing one type of sensory information at specific developmental times may lead to deficits across all sensory modalities. We addressed the effect of auditory deprivation on the development of tactile abilities, taking into account changes occurring at the behavioral and cortical level. Congenitally deaf and hearing individuals performed two tactile tasks, the first requiring the discrimination of the temporal duration of touches and the second requiring the discrimination of their spatial length. Compared with hearing individuals, deaf individuals were impaired only in tactile temporal processing. To explore the neural substrate of this difference, we ran a TMS experiment. In deaf individuals, the auditory association cortex was involved in temporal and spatial tactile processing, with the same chronometry as the primary somatosensory cortex. In hearing participants, the involvement of auditory association cortex occurred at a later stage and selectively for temporal discrimination. The different chronometry in the recruitment of the auditory cortex in deaf individuals correlated with the tactile temporal impairment. Thus, early hearing experience seems to be crucial to develop an efficient temporal processing across modalities, suggesting that plasticity does not necessarily result in behavioral compensation.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2010) 22 (6): 1262–1269.
Published: 01 June 2010
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Present theories of visual recognition emphasize the role of interactive processing across populations of neurons within a given network, but the nature of these interactions remains unresolved. In particular, data describing the sufficiency of feedforward algorithms for conscious vision and studies revealing the functional relevance of feedback connections to the striate cortex seem to offer contradictory accounts of visual information processing. TMS is a good method to experimentally address this issue, given its excellent temporal resolution and its capacity to establish causal relations between brain function and behavior. We studied 20 healthy volunteers in a visual recognition task. Subjects were briefly presented with images of animals (birds or mammals) in natural scenes and were asked to indicate the animal category. MRI-guided stereotaxic single TMS pulses were used to transiently disrupt striate cortex function at different times after image onset (SOA). Visual recognition was significantly impaired when TMS was applied over the occipital pole at SOAs of 100 and 220 msec. The first interval has consistently been described in previous TMS studies and is explained as the interruption of the feedforward volley of activity. Given the late latency and discrete nature of the second peak, we hypothesize that it represents the disruption of a feedback projection to V1, probably from other areas in the visual network. These results provide causal evidence for the necessity of recurrent interactive processing, through feedforward and feedback connections, in visual recognition of natural complex images.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2009) 21 (10): 1946–1955.
Published: 01 October 2009
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Interhemispheric competition between homologous areas in the human brain is believed to be involved in a wide variety of human behaviors from motor activity to visual perception and particularly attention. For example, patients with lesions in the posterior parietal cortex are unable to selectively track objects in the contralesional side of visual space when targets are simultaneously present in the ipsilesional visual field, a form of visual extinction. Visual extinction may arise due to an imbalance in the normal interhemispheric competition. To directly assess the issue of reciprocal inhibition, we used fMRI to localize those brain regions active during attention-based visual tracking and then applied low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over identified areas in the left and right intraparietal sulcus to asses the behavioral effects on visual tracking. We induced a severe impairment in visual tracking that was selective for conditions of simultaneous tracking in both visual fields. Our data show that the parietal lobe is essential for visual tracking and that the two hemispheres compete for attentional resources during tracking. Our results provide a neuronal basis for visual extinction in patients with parietal lobe damage.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008) 20 (4): 707–720.
Published: 01 April 2008
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Neuropsychological and neurophysiological studies suggest that the production of verbs in speech depends on cortical regions in the left frontal lobe. However, the precise topography of these regions, and their functional roles in verb production, remains matters of debate. In an earlier study with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), we showed that stimulation to the left anterior midfrontal gyrus disrupted verb production, but not noun production, in a task that required subjects to perform simple morphological alternations. This result raises a number of questions: for example, is the effect of stimulation focal and specific to that brain region? Is the behavioral effect limited to rule-based, regular transformations, or can it be generalized over the grammatical category? In the present study, we used rTMS to suppress the excitability of distinct parts of the left prefrontal cortex to assess their role in producing regular and irregular verbs compared to nouns. We compared rTMS to sham stimulation and to stimulation of homologous areas in the right hemisphere. Response latencies increased for verbs, but were unaffected for nouns, following stimulation to the left anterior midfrontal gyrus. No significant interference specific for verbs resulted after stimulation to two other areas in the left frontal lobe, the posterior midfrontal gyrus and Broca's area. These results therefore reinforce the idea that the left anterior midfrontal cortex is critical for processing verbs. Moreover, none of the regions stimulated was preferentially engaged in the production of regular or irregular inflection, raising questions about the role of the frontal lobes in processing inflectional morphology.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004) 16 (3): 374–381.
Published: 01 April 2004
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A number of researchers have proposed that the premotor and motor areas are critical for the representation of words that refer to actions, but not objects. Recent evidence against this hypothesis indicates that the left premotor cortex is more sensitive to grammatical differences than to conceptual differences between words. However, it may still be the case that other anterior motor regions are engaged in processing a word's sensorimotor features. In the present study, we used singleand paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that left primary motor cortex is activated during the retrieval of words (nouns and verbs) associated with specific actions. We found that activation in the motor cortex increased for action words compared with non-action words, but was not sensitive to the grammatical category of the word being produced. These results complement previous findings and support the notion that producing a word activates some brain regions relevant to the sensorimotor properties associated with that word regardless of its grammatical category.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2001) 13 (6): 713–720.
Published: 15 August 2001
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Selective deficits in producing verbs relative to nouns in speech are well documented in neuropsychology and have been associated with left hemisphere frontal cortical lesions resulting from stroke and other neurological disorders. The basis for these impairments is unresolved: Do they arise because of differences in the way grammatical categories of words are organized in the brain, or because of differences in the neural representation of actions and objects? We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of a portion of left prefrontal cortex and to assess its role in producing nouns and verbs. In one experiment subjects generated real words; in a second, they produced pseudowords as nouns or verbs. In both experiments, response latencies increased for verbs but were unaffected for nouns following rTMS. These results demonstrate that grammatical categories have a neuroanatomical basis and that the left prefrontal cortex is selectively engaged in processing verbs as grammatical objects.