Significant Volume Reduction and Shape Abnormalities of the Basal Ganglia in Cases of Chronic Liver Cirrhosis

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Chronic liver disease frequently includes cognitive and movement disorders, suggesting an alteration of the striatum. With the exception of hyperintensities evident on T1-weighted images indicative of Mn deposition, radiographic findings of the BG are nonspecific. Volumetric and morphometric analysis of DGM is limited. Whether DGM undergoes degeneration and whether this change is associated with pallidal hyperintensity and cognitive performance are currently unknown in patients with cirrhosis

Atypical birdsong and artificial languages provide insights into how communication systems are shaped by learning, use and transmission

In this article, I argue that a comparative approach focusing on the cognitive capacities and behavioral mechanisms that underlie vocal learning in songbirds and humans can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary origins of language. The experimental approaches I discuss use abnormal song and atypical linguistic input to study the processes of individual learning, social interaction, and cultural transmission. Atypical input places increased learning and communicative pressure on learners, so exploring how they respond to this type of input provides a particularly clear picture of the biases and constraints at work during learning and use. Furthermore, simulating the cultural transmission of these unnatural communication systems in the laboratory informs us about how learning and social biases influence the structure of communication systems in the long run. Findings based on these methods suggest fundamental similarities in the basic social–cognitive mechanisms underlying vocal learning in birds and humans, and continuing research promises insights into the uniquely human mechanisms and into how human cognition and social behavior interact, and ultimately impact on the evolution of language