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Background: Alexithymia, difficulty in recognising and naming emotions, is common among people who use alcohol. There is also emerging evidence that people with alexithymia are unable to distinguish emotions from non‐emotional physiological states. The project aimed to test if alcohol use is related to the way student drinkers experience emotions and physiological states in the body. Methods: We employed a novel method to study bodily sensations related to emotions and physiological states in the context of alcohol use: the emBODY tool, which allowed participants to mark areas of the body in which they experience various emotions and physiological states. Results: Students who showed a hazardous pattern of alcohol use (alcohol use disorders identification test [AUDIT] score ≥ 7, N = 91), overall, presented higher alexithymia levels and coloured larger areas for emotions and physiological states (showed less specificity) than those who show low‐risk alcohol consumption (AUDIT ≤ 4, N = 90). Moreover, statistical classifiers distinguished feeling‐specific maps less accurately for hazardous drinkers than low‐risk drinkers [F(1,1998) = 441.16; p < 0.001], confirming that higher alcohol use is related to higher confusion of emotional and non‐emotional bodily feelings. Conclusions: Plausibly, this increased bodily confusion drives alcohol consumption: alcohol may serve as a means of dealing with undifferentiated changes in psychophysiological arousal accompanying emotional states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Literacy acquisition is a demanding process that induces significant changes in the brain, especially in the spoken and written language networks. Nevertheless, large-scale paediatric fMRI studies are still limited. Methods We analyzed fMRI data to show how individual differences in reading performance correlate with brain activation for speech and print in 111 children attending kindergarten or first grade and examined group differences between a matched subset of emergent-readers and prereaders. Results Across the entire cohort, individual differences analysis revealed that reading skill was positively correlated with the magnitude of activation difference between words and symbol strings in left superior temporal, inferior frontal and fusiform gyri. Group comparisons of the matched subset of pre- and emergent-readers showed higher activity for emergent-readers in left inferior frontal, precentral, and postcentral gyri. Individual differences in activation for natural versus vocoded speech were also positively correlated with reading skill, primarily in the left temporal cortex. However, in contrast to studies on adult illiterates, group comparisons revealed higher activity in prereaders compared to readers in the frontal lobes. Print-speech coactivation was observed only in readers and individual differences analyses revealed a positive correlation between convergence and reading skill in the left superior temporal sulcus. Conclusions These results emphasise that a child's brain undergoes several modifications to both visual and oral language systems in the process of learning to read. They also suggest that print-speech convergence is a hallmark of acquiring literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of the caudate nucleus (CN) in motor control has been widely studied. Less attention has been paid to the dynamics of visual feedback in motor actions, which is a relevant function of the basal ganglia during the control of eye and body movements. We therefore set out to analyse the visual information processing of neurons in the feline CN. Extracellular single-unit recordings were performed in the CN, where the neuronal responses to drifting gratings of various spatial and temporal frequencies were recorded. The responses of the CN neurons were modulated by the temporal frequency of the grating. The CN units responded optimally to gratings of low spatial frequencies and exhibited low spatial resolution and fine spatial frequency tuning. By contrast, the CN neurons preferred high temporal frequencies, and exhibited high temporal resolution and fine temporal frequency tuning. The spatial and temporal visual properties of the CN neurons enable them to act as spatiotemporal filters. These properties are similar to those observed in certain feline extrageniculate visual structures, i.e. in the superior colliculus, the suprageniculate nucleus and the anterior ectosylvian cortex, but differ strongly from those of the primary visual cortex and the lateral geniculate nucleus. Accordingly, our results suggest a functional relationship of the CN to the extrageniculate tecto-thalamo-cortical system. This system of the mammalian brain may be involved in motion detection, especially in velocity analysis of moving objects, facilitating the detection of changes during the animal's movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]