Atypical Balance between Occipital and Fronto-Parietal Activation for Visual Shape Extraction in Dyslexia

Reading requires the extraction of letter shapes from a complex background of text, and an impairment in visual shape extraction would cause difficulty in reading. To investigate the neural mechanisms of visual shape extraction in dyslexia, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activation while adults with or without dyslexia responded to the change of an arrow’s direction in a complex, relative to a simple, visual background. In comparison to adults with typical reading ability, adults with dyslexia exhibited opposite patterns of atypical activation: decreased activation in occipital visual areas associated with visual perception, and increased activation in frontal and parietal regions associated with visual attention. These findings indicate that dyslexia involves atypical brain organization for fundamental processes of visual shape extraction even when reading is not involved. Overengagement in higher-order association cortices, required to compensate for underengagment in lower-order visual cortices, may result in competition for top-down attentional resources helpful for fluent reading.Ellison Medical FoundationMartin Richmond Memorial FundNational Institutes of Health (U.S.). (Grant UL1RR025758)National Institutes of Health (U.S.). (Grant F32EY014750-01)MIT Class of 1976 (Funds for Dyslexia Research

Competition and Living Lab Platform (Annex 74) Science & Technology (Subtask A) Focus Report 3: Project Facts Template

The focus report “Project Facts Template” contains a series of templates designed for summarizing quanti-tative information on competition buildings. Design, planning and implementation of the contributions to a building competition such as the Solar Decathlon are a continuous process during the whole competition. A number of characteristic facts and indicators of the buildings are created, which identify in detail their prop-erties and expectations. It is target of the template to systematically record and update the project facts and indicators for the buildings and technical systems. The template is linked to a systematic structure of all relevant data sheets of the products applied

Functional Hemispheric (A)symmetries in the Aged Brain-Relevance for Working Memory

Functional hemispheric asymmetries have been described in different cognitive processes, such as decision-making and motivation. Variations in the pattern of left/right activity have been associated with normal brain functioning, and with neuropsychiatric diseases. Such asymmetries in brain activity evolve throughout life and are thought to decrease with aging, but clear associations with cognitive function have never been established. Herein, we assessed functional laterality during a working memory task (N-Back) in a healthy aging cohort (over 50 years old) and associated these asymmetries with performance in the test. Activity of lobule VI of the cerebellar hemisphere and angular gyrus was found to be lateralized to the right hemisphere, while the precentral gyrus presented left > right activation during this task. Interestingly, 1-Back accuracy was positively correlated with left > right superior parietal lobule activation, which was mostly due to the influence of the left hemisphere. In conclusion, although regions were mostly symmetrically activated during the N-Back task, performance in working memory in aged individuals seems to benefit from lateralized involvement of the superior parietal lobule.NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000013, supported by the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), and was funded by the European Commission (FP7) “SwitchBox—Maintaining health in old age through homeostasis” (Seventh Framework Programme; Contract HEALTH-F2-2010-259772), by FEDER through the Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme (COMPETE) and by National Funds, through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007038, by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal; Contract Grant No: P-139977; project “TEMPO—Better mental health during ageing based on temporal prediction of individual brain ageing trajectories”) and by “PANINI—Physical Activity and Nutrition Influences In Ageing” (European Commission (Horizon 2020), Contract GA 675003); Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) (Grant Nos. SFRH/BD/52291/2013 to ME and PD/BD/106050/2015 to CP-N via Inter-University Doctoral Programme in Ageing and Chronic Disease (PhDOC), SFRH/BPD/80118/2011 to HL-A and SFRH/BD/90078/2012 to TCC); and FCT/MEC and ON.2–ONOVONORTE—North Portugal Regional Operational Programme 2007/2013, of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2007/2013, through FEDER (project FCTANR/NEU-OSD/0258/2012 to RM)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A prediction model of working memory across health and psychiatric disease using whole-brain functional connectivity.

Working memory deficits are present in many neuropsychiatric diseases with diagnosis-related severity. However, it is unknown whether this common behavioral abnormality is a continuum explained by a neural mechanism shared across diseases or a set of discrete dysfunctions. Here, we performed predictive modeling to examine working memory ability (WMA) as a function of normative whole-brain connectivity across psychiatric diseases. We built a quantitative model for letter three-back task performance in healthy participants, using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). This normative model was applied to independent participants (N = 965) including four psychiatric diagnoses. Individual's predicted WMA significantly correlated with a measured WMA in both healthy population and schizophrenia. Our predicted effect size estimates on WMA impairment were comparable to previous meta-analysis results. These results suggest a general association between brain connectivity and working memory ability applicable commonly to health and psychiatric diseases

Selectively Enhanced Development of Working Memory in Musically Trained Children and Adolescents

In the current longitudinal study, we investigated the development of working memory in musically trained and nontrained children and adolescents, aged 9–20. We measured working memory with the Digit Span (DS) forwards and backwards tests (N = 106) and the Trail-Making A and B (TMT-A and B; N = 104) tests three times, in 2011, 2013, and 2016. We expected that musically trained participants would outperform peers with no musical training. Indeed, we found that the younger musically trained participants, in particular, outperformed their nontrained peers in the TMT-A, TMT-B and DS forwards tests. These tests all primarily require active maintenance of a rule in memory or immediate recall. In contrast, we found no group differences in the backwards test that requires manipulation and updating of information in working memory. These results suggest that musical training is more strongly associated with heightened working memory capacity and maintenance than enhanced working memory updating, especially in late childhood and early adolescence.Peer reviewe

Neural correlates of verbal working memory: an fMRI meta-analysis

Verbal Working memory (vWM) capacity measures the ability to maintain and manipulate verbal information for a short period of time. The specific neural correlates of this construct are still a matter of debate. The aim of this study was to conduct a coordinate-based meta-analysis of 42 fMRI studies on visual vWM in healthy subjects (n=795, males=459, females=325, unknown=11; age range: 18-75). The studies were obtained after an exhaustive literature search on PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Brainmap database. We analyzed regional activation differences during fMRI tasks with the anisotropic effect-size version of seed-based d mapping software (ES-SDM). The results were further validated by performing jackknife sensitivity analyses and heterogeneity analyses. We investigated the effect of numerous relevant influencing factors by fitting corresponding linear regression models. We isolated consistent activation in a network containing fronto-parietal areas, right cerebellum, and basal ganglia structures. Regarding lateralization, the results pointed towards a bilateral frontal activation, a left-lateralization of parietal regions and a right-lateralization of the cerebellum, indicating that the left-hemisphere concept of vWM should be reconsidered. We also isolated activation in regions important for response inhibition, emphasizing the role of attentional control in vWM. Moreover, we found a significant influence of mean reaction time, load and age on activation associated with vWM. Activation in left medial frontal gyrus, left precentral gyrus and left precentral gyrus turned out to be positively associated with mean reaction time whereas load was associated with activation across the PFC, fusiform gyrus, parietal cortex and parts of the cerebellum. In the latter case activation was mainly detectable in both hemispheres whereas the influence of age became manifest predominantly in the left hemisphere. This led us to conclude that future vWM studies should take these factors into consideration