N1 enhancement in synesthesia during visual and audio-visual perception in semantic cross-modal conflict situations: an ERP study

Synesthesia entails a special kind of sensory perception, where stimulation in one sensory modality leads to an internally generated perceptual experience of another, not stimulated sensory modality. This phenomenon can be viewed as an abnormal multisensory integration process as here the synesthetic percept is aberrantly fused with the stimulated modality. Indeed, recent synesthesia research has focused on multimodal processing even outside of the specific synesthesia-inducing context and has revealed changed multimodal integration, thus suggesting perceptual alterations at a global level. Here, we focused on audio-visual processing in synesthesia using a semantic classification task in combination with visually or auditory-visually presented animated and in animated objects in an audio-visual congruent and incongruent manner. Fourteen subjects with auditory-visual and/or grapheme-color synesthesia and 14 control subjects participated in the experiment. During presentation of the stimuli, event-related potentials were recorded from 32 electrodes. The analysis of reaction times and error rates revealed no group differences with best performance for audio-visually congruent stimulation indicating the well-known multimodal facilitation effect. We found enhanced amplitude of the N1 component over occipital electrode sites for synesthetes compared to controls. The differences occurred irrespective of the experimental condition and therefore suggest a global influence on early sensory processing in synesthetes

Neural activity in relation to clinically derived personality syndromes in depression using a psychodynamic fMRI paradigm

Objective: The heterogeneity between patients with depression cannot be captured adequately with existing descriptive systems of diagnosis and neurobiological models of depression. Furthermore, considering the highly individual nature of depression, the application of general stimuli in past research efforts may not capture the essence of the disorder. This study aims to identify subtypes of depression by using empirically-derived personality-syndromes, and to explore neural correlates of the derived personality syndromes.Method: In the present exploratory study an individually tailored and psychodynamically based fMRI paradigm using dysfunctional relationship patterns was presented to 20 chronically depressed patients. Results from the Shedler-Westen-Assessment-Procedure (SWAP-200) were analyzed by Q-factor analysis to identify clinically relevant subgroups of depression and related brain activation.Results: The principle component analysis of SWAP-200 items from all 20 patients lead to a 2-factor solution: Depressive Personality and Emotional-Hostile-Externalizing Personality. Both factors were used in a whole-brain correlational analysis but only the second factor yielded significant positive correlations in four regions: A large cluster in the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the left ventral striatum, a small cluster in the left temporal pole and another small cluster in the right middle frontal gyrus. Discussion: The degree to which patients with depression score high on the factor Emotional-Hostile-Externalizing Personality correlated with relatively higher activity in three key areas involved in emotion processing, evaluation of reward/punishment, negative cognitions, depressive pathology and social knowledge (OFC, ventral striatum, temporal pole). Results may contribute to an alternative description of neural correlates of depression showing differential brain activation dependent on the extent of specific personality syndromes in depression