Brain Sciences, Volume 9, Issue 2

Introduction: The proportion of university/college students (UCS) consuming alcohol is similar to the number of those reporting poor sleep, at approximately 30%, the proportion being greater in student athletes (SA). What remains to be understood is...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an often debilitating disease with a lifetime prevalence rate between 5–8%. In war veterans, these numbers are even higher, reaching approximately 10% to 25%. Although most patients benefit from the use...

Despite substantial experience with deep brain stimulation for movement disorders and recent interest in electrode targeting under general anesthesia, little is known about whether awake macrostimulation during electrode targeting predicts postoperat...

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common heritable form of cognitive impairment. It results from a deficiency in the fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) due to a CGG repeat expansion in the 5′-UTR of the X-linked FMR1 gene. When CGGs...

The ability to coordinate one’s behavior with the others’ behavior is essential to achieve a joint action in daily life. In this paper, the brain activity during synchronized tapping task was measured using functional near infrared spectr...

Background: The present study compared corticospinal excitability to the biceps brachii muscle during arm cycling at a self-selected and a fixed cadence (SSC and FC, respectively). We hypothesized that corticospinal excitability would not be differen...

More than ~200 CGG repeats in the 5′ untranslated region of the FMR1 gene results in transcriptional silencing and the absence of the FMR1 encoded protein, FMRP. FMRP is an RNA-binding protein that regulates the transport and translation of a v...

Studies of novel noun learning show bilingual children rely less on the Mutual Exclusivity Constraint (MEC) for word learning than monolinguals. Shifting the focus to learning novel property terms (adjectives), the present study compared 3.5- and fiv...

The present study aimed to examine the effects of chronological age and cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) on cognitive performance and prefrontal cortex activity, and to test the compensation-related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis (CRUNCH)....

Negative urgency is a personality trait reflecting the tendency to act rashly in response to extreme negative emotions and is considered a transdiagnostic endophenotype for problematic levels of addictive behaviors. Recent research has begun to ident...

As the HIV population ages, the prevalence of cognitive impairment (CI) is increasing, yet few services exist for the assessment and management of these individuals. Here we provide an initial description of a memory assessment service for people liv...

We examined the behavioral response (BR) and threshold (T) axes of Dunn’s four-quadrant model of sensory processing (1997). We assessed whether they are ordinal ranges and if variation is associated with other similarly described characteristic...

Quantifying gait and postural control adds valuable information that aids in understanding neurological conditions where motor symptoms predominate and cause considerable functional impairment. Disease-specific clinical scales exist; however, they ar...

In oral language, syntactic structure is cued in part by phrasal metrical hierarchies of acoustic stress patterns. For example, many children’s texts use prosodic phrasing comprising tightly integrated hierarchies of metre and syntax to highlig...

Catatonia is often a presentation of extreme anxiety and depression. Missing the diagnosis of catatonia would lead to improper treatment, which could be life-threatening. A thorough physical and psychiatric assessment is required for detecting the ca...

Viral vector-mediated gene therapy has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years. Although the reasons for this progress are varied, a deeper understanding of the basic biology of the viruses, the identification of new and improved versio...

In the last years, lysosomal storage diseases appear as a bridge of knowledge between rare genetic inborn metabolic disorders and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) or frontotemporal dementia. Epidemiological studies helped p...

Background: Although depression and financial distress are correlated, this association may differ for demographic groups, particularly based on race. Aim: Using a national sample of American adults, this study tested whether the association between...

Optogenetic manipulation is uniquely useful in unraveling the functional organization of neuronal circuits in the central nervous system by enabling reversible gain- or loss-of-function of discrete populations of neurons within restricted brain regio...

Language delay and communication deficits are a core characteristic of the fragile X syndrome (FXS) phenotype. To date, the literature examining early language development in FXS is limited potentially due to barriers in language assessment in very y...

The mental speed approach to individual differences in mental ability (MA) is based on the assumption of higher speed of information processing in individuals with higher than those with lower MA. Empirical support of this assumption has been inconsi...

Elements in speech and music unfold sequentially over time. To produce sentences and melodies quickly and accurately, individuals must plan upcoming sequence events, as well as monitor outcomes via auditory feedback. We investigated the neural correl...

The field of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) has grown rapidly in the last few decades, allowing the development of ever faster and more reliable assistive technologies for converting brain activity into control signals for external devices fo...

The field of neuromodulation has seen unprecedented growth over the course of the last decade with novel waveforms, hardware advancements, and novel chronic pain indications. We present here an updated review on spinal cord stimulation, dorsal root g...

Modelling 3D objects in CAD software requires special skills which require a novice user to undergo a series of training exercises to obtain. To minimize the training time for a novice user, the user-dependent factors must be studied. we have present...

To date, there has been limited research on the primary concerns and treatment priorities for individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS) and their families. The National Fragile X Foundation in collaboration with clinical investigators from industry a...

Microelectrode implants are an important tool in neuroscience research and in developing brain–machine interfaces. Data from rodents have consistently shown that astrocytes are recruited to the area surrounding implants, forming a glial scar th...

Due to its anti-glucocorticoid properties, the steroid hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) might play a role for coping with traumatic stress and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The majority of studies report elevated DHEA secretion and decre...

The term “lacunar infarction” referred to small infarctions in the basal ganglia, internal capsule, thalamus, and brainstem, due to hypertensive small vessel disease. However, it has become common to refer to all small infarctions as lacunar. It is i...