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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a range of neurodevelopmental diseases characterized by social dysfunction and stereotypic behaviors. The etiology of ASD remains largely unexplored, resulting in a diverse array of described clinical manifestations and varying degrees of severity. Currently, there are no drugs approved by a supervisory organization that can effectively treat the core symptoms of ASD. Childhood and adolescence are crucial stages for making significant achievements in ASD treatment, necessitating the development of drugs specifically for these periods. Based on the drug targets and mechanisms of action, it can be found that atypical psychotropic medications, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant medications, hormonal medications, ion channel medications, and gastrointestinal medications have shown significant improvement in treating the core symptoms of ASD in both children and adolescents. In addition, comparisons of drugs within the same category regarding efficacy and safety have been made to identify better alternatives and promote drug development. While further evaluation of the effectiveness and safety of these medications is needed, they hold great potential for widespread application in the clinical treatment of the principal symptoms of ASD.

Obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) significantly impairs children's growth and cognition. This study aims to elucidate the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying OSAHS in children, with a particular focus on the alterations in cortical information interaction during respiratory events. We analyzed sleep electroencephalography before, during, and after events, utilizing Symbolic Transfer Entropy (STE) for brain network construction and information flow assessment. The results showed a significant increase in STE after events in specific frequency bands during N2 and rapid eye movement (REM) stages, along with increased STE during N3 stage events. Moreover, a noteworthy rise in the information flow imbalance within and between hemispheres was found after events, displaying unique patterns in central sleep apnea and hypopnea. Importantly, some of these alterations were correlated with symptom severity. These findings highlight significant changes in brain region coordination and communication during respiratory events, offering novel insights into OSAHS pathophysiology in children., (© 2024. Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.)

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent psychiatric condition often accompanied by severe impairments in cognitive and functional capacities. This research was conducted to identify RNA modification-related gene signatures and associated functional pathways in MDD. Differentially expressed RNA modification-related genes in MDD were first identified. And a random forest model was developed and distinct RNA modification patterns were discerned based on signature genes. Then, comprehensive analyses of RNA modification-associated genes in MDD were performed, including functional analyses and immune cell infiltration. The study identified 29 differentially expressed RNA modification-related genes in MDD and two distinct RNA modification patterns. TRMT112, MBD3, NUDT21, and IGF2BP1 of the risk signature were detected. Functional analyses confirmed the involvement of RNA modification in pathways like phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase signaling and nucleotide oligomerization domain (NOD)-like receptor signaling in MDD. NUDT21 displayed a strong positive correlation with type 2 T helper cells, while IGF2BP1 negatively correlated with activated CD8 T cells, central memory CD4 T cells, and natural killer T cells. In summary, further research into the roles of NUDT21 and IGF2BP1 would be valuable for understanding MDD prognosis. The identified RNA modification-related gene signatures and pathways provide insights into MDD molecular etiology and potential diagnostic biomarkers., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Background: Hearing impairment is a common condition in the elderly. However, a comprehensive understanding of its neural correlates is still lacking., Methods: We recruited 284 elderly adults who underwent structural MRI, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, audiometry, and cognitive assessments. Individual hearing abilities indexed by pure tone average (PTA) were correlated with multiple structural MRI-derived cortical morphological indices. For regions showing significant correlations, mediation analyses were performed to examine their role in the relationship between hearing ability and cognitive function. Finally, the correlation maps between hearing ability and cortical morphology were linked with publicly available connectomic gradient, transcriptomic, and neurotransmitter maps., Findings: Poorer hearing was related to cortical thickness (CT) reductions in widespread regions and gyrification index (GI) reductions in the right Area 52 and Insular Granular Complex. The GI in the right Area 52 mediated the relationship between hearing ability and executive function. This mediating effect was further modulated by glutamate and N-acetylaspartate levels in the right auditory region. The PTA-CT correlation map followed microstructural connectomic hierarchy, were related to genes involved in certain biological processes (e.g., glutamate metabolic process), cell types (e.g., excitatory neurons and astrocytes), and developmental stages (i.e., childhood to young adulthood), and covaried with dopamine receptor 1, dopamine transporter, and fluorodopa. The PTA-GI correlation map was related to 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor 2a., Interpretation: Poorer hearing is associated with cortical thinning and folding reductions, which may be engaged in the relationship between hearing impairment and cognitive decline in the elderly and have different neurobiological substrates., Funding: See the Acknowledgements section., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this work., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: To investigate the relationship between maternal folic acid (FA) supplementation during the pre-conceptional and prenatal periods and the subsequent risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in offspring., Methods: A total of 6,049 toddlers aged 16-30 months were recruited from August 2016 to March 2017 for this cross-sectional study conducted in China. The parents of the enrolled toddlers provided information on maternal supplemental FA, socio-demographic information, and related covariates. Standard diagnostic procedures were implemented to identify toddlers with ASD., Results: Among the 6,049 children included in the study, consisting of 3,364 boys with an average age of 22.7 ± 4.1 months, a total of 71 children (1.2%) were diagnosed with ASD. Mothers who did not consume FA supplements during the prenatal period were found to have a significantly increased risk of having offspring with ASD, in comparison to those who were exposed to FA supplements (odds ratio [ OR ] = 2.47). However, we did not find a similar association during the pre-conceptional period. Compared to mothers who consistently used FA supplements from pre-conception to the prenatal period, those who never used FA supplements were statistically significantly associated with a higher risk of ASD in their offspring ( OR  = 2.88)., Conclusion: This study indicated that providing continuous maternal FA supplementation during the pre-conceptional and prenatal periods may decrease the risk of ASD in offspring. The prenatal period is considered to be the most crucial time for intervention., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Jiang, Guo, Kuang, Lin, Xu, Pan, Weng, Jing, Shi, Yi and Wang.)

Background: Neuroimaging-based connectome studies have indicated that major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with disrupted topological organization of large-scale brain networks. However, the disruptions and their clinical and cognitive relevance are not well established for morphological brain networks in adolescent MDD., Objective: To investigate the topological alterations of single-subject morphological brain networks in adolescent MDD., Methods: Twenty-five first-episode, treatment-naive adolescents with MDD and 19 healthy controls (HCs) underwent T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and a battery of neuropsychological tests. Single-subject morphological brain networks were constructed separately based on cortical thickness, fractal dimension, gyrification index, and sulcus depth, and topologically characterized by graph-based approaches. Between-group differences were inferred by permutation testing. For significant alterations, partial correlations were used to examine their associations with clinical and neuropsychological variables in the patients. Finally, a support vector machine was used to classify the patients from controls., Results: Compared with the HCs, the patients exhibited topological alterations only in cortical thickness-based networks characterized by higher nodal centralities in parietal (left primary sensory cortex) but lower nodal centralities in temporal (left parabelt complex, right perirhinal ectorhinal cortex, right area PHT and right ventral visual complex) regions. Moreover, decreased nodal centralities of some temporal regions were correlated with cognitive dysfunction and clinical characteristics of the patients. These results were largely reproducible for binary and weighted network analyses. Finally, topological properties of the cortical thickness-based networks were able to distinguish the MDD adolescents from HCs with 87.6% accuracy., Conclusion: Adolescent MDD is associated with disrupted topological organization of morphological brain networks, and the disruptions provide potential biomarkers for diagnosing and monitoring the disease., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of West China School of Medicine/West China Hospital (WCSM/WCH) of Sichuan University.)

Humans can accurately recognize familiar faces in only a few hundred milliseconds, but the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Here, we recorded intracranial electrophysiological signals from ventral temporal cortex (VTC), superior/middle temporal cortex (STC/MTC), medial parietal cortex (MPC), and amygdala/hippocampus (AMG/HPC) in 20 epilepsy patients while they viewed faces of famous people and strangers as well as common objects. In posterior VTC and MPC, familiarity-sensitive responses emerged significantly later than initial face-selective responses, suggesting that familiarity enhances face representations after they are first being extracted. Moreover, viewing famous faces increased the coupling between cortical areas and AMG/HPC in multiple frequency bands. These findings advance our understanding of the neural basis of familiar face perception by identifying the top-down modulation in local face-selective response and interactions between cortical face areas and AMG/HPC., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Neural tuning for print refers to differential neural responses (e.g., the N1 component of event-related potentials) to different orthographic forms and other visual stimuli. While impaired neural tuning for print has been well established in dyslexic children who read alphabetic scripts, it remains unclear whether such effects exist in dyslexic children who read Chinese, which dramatically differs in visual and linguistic characteristics from alphabetic words. To fill this gap, we examined two levels of the neural tuning for print: coarse tuning (i.e., false character vs. stroke combination), and fine tuning (i.e., sub-lexical tuning: pseudo character vs. false character; and lexical tuning: real character vs. pseudo character). Using the event-related potential technique, we examined 14 typically developing children and 16 dyslexic children who were screened from 216 nine-year-old children in the third grade. For typically developing children, we observed both coarse and sub-lexical tuning. Critically, for dyslexic children, we found stronger N1 for false character than for stroke combination, suggesting intact coarse tuning, but a reduced N1 difference between false character and pseudo character, suggesting impaired sub-lexical tuning. These results clearly show selective impairments in fine neural tuning at the sub-lexical level in Chinese dyslexic children. Our findings may be associated with unique features of Chinese characters.

It has been well established that very-high-altitude (>4000 m) environments can affect human cognitive function and brain activity. However, the effects of long-term exposure to moderate altitudes (2000−3000 m) on cognitive function and brain activity are not well understood. In the present cross-sectional study, we utilized an N-back working memory task and resting-state functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine the effects of two years of exposure to 2260 m altitude on working memory and resting-state brain activity in 208 college students, compared with a control group at the sea level. The results showed that there was no significant change in spatial working memory performance after two years of exposure to 2260 m altitude. In contrast, the analysis of resting-state brain activity revealed changes in functional connectivity patterns in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), with the global efficiency increased and the local efficiency decreased after two years of exposure to 2260 m altitude. These results suggest that long-term exposure to moderate altitudes has no observable effect on spatial working memory performance, while significant changes in functional connectivity and brain network properties could possibly occur to compensate for the effects of mild hypoxic environments. To our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the resting state activity in the PFC associated with working memory in people exposed to moderate altitudes.

The fusiform face area (FFA) is a core cortical region for face information processing. Evidence suggests that its sensitivity to faces is largely innate and tuned by visual experience. However, how experience in different time windows shape the plasticity of the FFA remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the role of visual experience at different time points of an individual's early development in the cross-modal face specialization of the FFA. Participants (n = 74) were classified into five groups: congenital blind, early blind, late blind, low vision, and sighted control. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired when the participants haptically processed carved faces and other objects. Our results showed a robust and highly consistent face-selective activation in the FFA region in the early blind participants, invariant to size and level of abstraction of the face stimuli. The cross-modal face activation in the FFA was much less consistent in other groups. These results suggest that early visual experience primes cross-modal specialization of the FFA, and even after the absence of visual experience for more than 14 years in early blind participants, their FFA can engage in cross-modal processing of face information., (Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Background: Despite accumulating evidence for the hippocampus as a key dysfunctional node in major depressive disorder (MDD), previous findings are controversial possibly due to heterogeneous and small clinical samples, complicated hippocampal structure, and different imaging modalities and analytical methods., Methods: We collected structural and resting-state functional MRI data from 100 first-episode, drug-naïve MDD patients and 99 healthy controls. A subset of the participants (34 patients and 33 controls) also completed a battery of neuropsychological tests and childhood trauma questionnaires. Seed-based morphological and functional (static and dynamic) connectivity were calculated for ten hippocampal subregions, followed by analyses of dynamic functional connectivity states (k-means clustering), connectivity cross-modality relationships (cosine similarity), and connectivity associations with clinical and neuropsychological variables (Spearman correlation)., Results: Between-group comparisons revealed abnormal hippocampal connectivity in the patients that depended on 1) hippocampal subdivisions: the cornu ammonis (CA) was the most seriously affected subregion, in particular the right CA1 for functional connectivity alterations; 2) imaging modality: morphological connectivity revealed seldom and sporadic alterations with different lobes, while functional connectivity identified numerous and convergent alterations with prefrontal regions; and 3) time scale: dynamic functional connectivity was more sensitive than static functional connectivity, in particular in revealing alterations between the right CA1 and contralateral prefrontal cortex. Among the 34 patients, functional connectivity alterations of the CA1 were related to the history of childhood trauma in the patients., Limitations: Only a subset of the patients completed the neuropsychological tests, which may cause underestimation of cognitive relevance of hippocampal connectivity alterations., Conclusions: Disrupted hippocampal CA1 functional connectivity plays key roles in the pathophysiology of MDD and may act as a potential diagnostic biomarker for the disease., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty objectively refer to the perception and evaluation of moral traits, which are generally influenced by facial attractiveness. For centuries, people have equated beauty with the possession of positive qualities, but it is not clear whether the association between beauty and positive qualities exerts a similarly implicit influence on people's responses to moral goodness and moral beauty, how it affects those responses, and what is the neural basis for such an effect. The present study is the first to examine the neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty. We found that beautiful faces in both moral judgments activated the left ventral occipitotemporal cortices sensitive to the geometric configuration of the faces, demonstrating that both moral goodness and moral beauty required the automatic visual analysis of geometrical configuration of attractive faces. In addition, compared to beautiful faces during moral goodness judgment, beautiful faces during moral beauty judgment induced unique activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and midline cortical structures involved in the emotional-valenced information about attractive faces. The opposite comparison elicited specific activity in the left superior temporal cortex and premotor area, which play a critical role in the recognition of facial identity. Our results demonstrated that the neural responses to facial attractiveness in the process of higher order moral decision-makings exhibit both task-general and task-specific characteristics. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the essence of the relationship between morality and aesthetics., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Background: The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is one of the main causes of viral hepatitis and liver cancer. HBV integration is one of the key steps in the virus-promoted malignant transformation., Results: An attention-based deep learning model, DeepHBV, was developed to predict HBV integration sites. By learning local genomic features automatically, DeepHBV was trained and tested using HBV integration site data from the dsVIS database. Initially, DeepHBV showed an AUROC of 0.6363 and an AUPR of 0.5471 for the dataset. The integration of genomic features of repeat peaks and TCGA Pan-Cancer peaks significantly improved model performance, with AUROCs of 0.8378 and 0.9430 and AUPRs of 0.7535 and 0.9310, respectively. The transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) were significantly enriched near the genomic positions that were considered. The binding sites of the AR-halfsite, Arnt, Atf1, bHLHE40, bHLHE41, BMAL1, CLOCK, c-Myc, COUP-TFII, E2A, EBF1, Erra, and Foxo3 were highlighted by DeepHBV in both the dsVIS and VISDB datasets, revealing a novel integration preference for HBV., Conclusions: DeepHBV is a useful tool for predicting HBV integration sites, revealing novel insights into HBV integration-related carcinogenesis.

Brain growth charts and age-normed brain templates are essential resources for researchers to eventually contribute to the care of individuals with atypical developmental trajectories. The present work generates age-normed brain templates for children and adolescents at one-year intervals and the corresponding growth charts to investigate the influences of age and ethnicity using a common pediatric neuroimaging protocol. Two accelerated longitudinal cohorts with the identical experimental design were implemented in the United States and China. Anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of typically developing school-age children (TDC) was obtained up to three times at nominal intervals of 1.25 years. The protocol generated and compared population- and age-specific brain templates and growth charts, respectively. A total of 674 Chinese pediatric MRI scans were obtained from 457 Chinese TDC and 190 American pediatric MRI scans were obtained from 133 American TDC. Population- and age-specific brain templates were used to quantify warp cost, the differences between individual brains and brain templates. Volumetric growth charts for labeled brain network areas were generated. Shape analyses of cost functions supported the necessity of age-specific and ethnicity-matched brain templates, which was confirmed by growth chart analyses. These analyses revealed volumetric growth differences between the two ethnicities primarily in lateral frontal and parietal areas, regions which are most variable across individuals in regard to their structure and function. Age- and ethnicity-specific brain templates facilitate establishing unbiased pediatric brain growth charts, indicating the necessity of the brain charts and brain templates generated in tandem. These templates and growth charts as well as related codes have been made freely available to the public for open neuroscience (https://github.com/zuoxinian/CCS/tree/master/H3/GrowthCharts)., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2020 Science China Press. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The process of reading words depends heavily on efficient visual skills, including analyzing and decomposing basic visual features. Surprisingly, previous reading-related studies have almost exclusively focused on gross aspects of visual skills, while only very few have investigated the role of finer skills. The present study filled this gap and examined the relations of two finer visual skills measured by grating acuity (the ability to resolve periodic luminance variations across space) and Vernier acuity (the ability to detect/discriminate relative locations of features) to Chinese character-processing as measured by character form-matching and lexical decision tasks in skilled adult readers. The results showed that Vernier acuity was significantly correlated with performance in character form-matching but not visual symbol form-matching, while no correlation was found between grating acuity and character processing. Interestingly, we found no correlation of the two visual skills with lexical decision performance. These findings provide for the first time empirical evidence that the finer visual skills, particularly as reflected in Vernier acuity, may directly contribute to an early stage of hierarchical word processing.

Human occipital-temporal cortex features several areas sensitive to faces, presumably forming the biological substrate for face perception. To date, there are piecemeal insights regarding the functional organization of these regions. They have come, however, from studies that are far from homogeneous with regard to the regions involved, the experimental design, and the data analysis approach. In order to provide an overall view of the functional organization of the face-sensitive areas, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive study that taps into the pivotal functional properties of all the face-sensitive areas, within the context of the same experimental design, and uses multiple data analysis approaches. In this study, we identified the most robustly activated face-sensitive areas in bilateral occipital-temporal cortices (i.e., AFP, aFFA, pFFA, OFA, pcSTS, pSTS) and systemically compared their regionally averaged activation and multivoxel activation patterns to 96 images from 16 object categories, including faces and non-faces. This condition-rich and single-image analysis approach critically samples the functional properties of a brain region, allowing us to test how two basic functional properties, namely face-category selectivity and face-exemplar sensitivity are distributed among these regions. Moreover, by examining the correlational structure of neural responses to the 96 images, we characterize their interactions in the greater face-processing network. We found that (1) r-pFFA showed the highest face-category selectivity, followed by l-pFFA, bilateral aFFA and OFA, and then bilateral pcSTS. In contrast, bilateral AFP and pSTS showed low face-category selectivity; (2) l-aFFA, l-pcSTS and bilateral AFP showed evidence of face-exemplar sensitivity; (3) r-OFA showed high overall response similarities with bilateral LOC and r-pFFA, suggesting it might be a transitional stage between general and face-selective information processing; (4) r-aFFA showed high face-selective response similarity with r-pFFA and r-OFA, indicating it was specifically involved in processing face information. Results also reveal two properties of these face sensitive regions across the two hemispheres: (1) the averaged left intra-hemispheric response similarity for the images was lower than the averaged right intra-hemispheric and the inter-hemispheric response similarity, implying convergence of face processing towards the right hemisphere, and (2) the response similarities between homologous regions in the two hemispheres decreased as information processing proceeded from the early, more posterior, processing stage (OFA), indicating an increasing degree of hemispheric specialization and right hemisphere bias for face information processing. This study contributes to an emerging picture of how faces are processed within the occipital and temporal cortex., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The aim of our study was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how spontaneous activity interacts with evoked activity, as well as how the temporal structure of spontaneous activity, that is, long-range temporal correlations, relate to this interaction. Using an extremely sparse event-related design (intertrial intervals: 52-60 s), a novel blood oxygen level-dependent signal correction approach (accounting for spontaneous fluctuations using pseudotrials) and phase analysis, we provided direct evidence for a nonadditive interaction between spontaneous and evoked activity. We demonstrated the discrepancy between the present and previous observations on why a linear superposition between spontaneous and evoked activity can be seen by using co-occurring signals from homologous brain regions. Importantly, we further demonstrated that the nonadditive interaction can be characterized by phase-dependent effects of spontaneous activity, which is closely related to the degree of long-range temporal correlations in spontaneous activity as indexed by both power-law exponent and phase-amplitude coupling. Our findings not only contribute to the understanding of spontaneous brain activity and its scale-free properties, but also bear important implications for our understanding of neural activity in general., (© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

The N170 component of EEG evoked by visual words is an index of perceptual expertise for the visual word across different writing systems. In the present study, we investigated whether these N170 markers for Chinese, a very complex script, could emerge quickly after short-term learning (∼ 100 min) in young Chinese children, and whether early writing experience can enhance the acquisition of these neural markers for expertise. Two groups of preschool children received visual identification and free writing training respectively. Short-term character training resulted in selective enhancement of the N170 to characters, consistent with normal expert processing. Visual identification training resulted in increased N170 amplitude to characters in the right hemisphere, and N170 amplitude differences between characters and faces were decreased; whereas the amplitude difference between characters and tools increased. Writing training led to the disappearance of an initial amplitude difference between characters and faces in the right hemisphere. These results show that N170 markers for visual expertise emerge rapidly in young children after word learning, independent of the type of script young children learn; and visual identification and writing produce different effects., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

For accurate diagnosis and prognostic prediction of acquired brain injury (ABI), it is crucial to understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying loss of consciousness. However, there is no consensus on which regions and networks act as biomarkers for consciousness level and recovery outcome in ABI. Using resting-state fMRI, we assessed intrinsic functional connectivity strength (FCS) of whole-brain networks in a large sample of 99 ABI patients with varying degrees of consciousness loss (including fully preserved consciousness state, minimally conscious state, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state, and coma) and 34 healthy control subjects. Consciousness level was evaluated using the Glasgow Coma Scale and Coma Recovery Scale-Revised on the day of fMRI scanning; recovery outcome was assessed using the Glasgow Outcome Scale 3 months after the fMRI scanning. One-way ANOVA of FCS, Spearman correlation analyses between FCS and the consciousness level and recovery outcome, and FCS-based multivariate pattern analysis were performed. We found decreased FCS with loss of consciousness primarily distributed in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCU), medial prefrontal cortex, and lateral parietal cortex. The FCS values of these regions were significantly correlated with consciousness level and recovery outcome. Multivariate support vector machine discrimination analysis revealed that the FCS patterns predicted whether patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state and coma would regain consciousness with an accuracy of 81.25%, and the most discriminative region was the PCC/PCU. These findings suggest that intrinsic functional connectivity patterns of the human posteromedial cortex could serve as a potential indicator for consciousness level and recovery outcome in individuals with ABI., Significance Statement: Varying degrees of consciousness loss and recovery are commonly observed in acquired brain injury patients, yet the underlying neurobiological mechanisms remain elusive. Using a large sample of patients with varying degrees of consciousness loss, we demonstrate that intrinsic functional connectivity strength in many brain regions, especially in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus, significantly correlated with consciousness level and recovery outcome. We further demonstrate that the functional connectivity pattern of these regions can predict patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state and coma would regain consciousness with an accuracy of 81.25%. Our study thus provides potentially important biomarkers of acquired brain injury in clinical diagnosis, prediction of recovery outcome, and decision making for treatment strategies for patients with severe loss of consciousness., (Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/3512933-15$15.00/0.)

Objective: Currently, it is unclear whether a radical-by-radical (RBR) reading strategy exists in Chinese pure alexia, compared to the letter-by-letter (LBL) reading strategy in alphabetic languages. In this study, we focus on exploring the reading features of a Chinese pure alexic patient during the process of language recovery., Method: We investigated this issue using a series of neuropsychological tests at 4 days, 11 days, and 8 months after admission of a Chinese pure alexic patient., Results: The results showed that most words could not be read aloud initially by the patient. One week later, 2 clinical features were noted: RBR reading strategy and integration impairment. Finally, there were statistically significant differences in the reaction time between the single characters and compound characters, which indicated that a radical number effect may exist., Conclusion: Combined with the results of previous studies, the current case study indicates that there is evidence suggesting that the RBR reading strategy in Chinese pure alexia is of limited benefit, a result that appears fundamentally different from the LBL reading strategy., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Three experiments examined whether a Stroop effect emerges in the processing of complex Chinese characters that contain a color-related radical. In Experiment 1, a Stroop effect occurred when participants responded to the black or white color of the simple characters [Chinese character: see text] (black) and [Chinese character: see text] (white) by making a left or right keypress. For Experiment 2, in which the stimuli were complex characters whose meanings were unrelated to color but that contained [Chinese character: see text] or [Chinese character: see text] as a radical, a Stroop effect also occurred, although it was smaller than in Experiment 1. Furthermore, this Stroop effect as a function of radical meaning was shown again in Experiment 3 for low-frequency complex characters but not high-frequency ones. These results suggest that the semantic representations of the complex characters’ color-related radicals are accessed in the context of a Stroop color word task, especially for low-frequency characters. Reduction of the Stroop effect in complex characters composed of one radical with color meaning and one without is similar to dilution of the Stroop effect that occurs when a color word is accompanied by a neutral word. Possible implications of the results for accounts of Stroop dilution are discussed.

In this study, we investigated whether the meanings of radicals are involved in reading ideogrammic compounds in a spatial Stroop task. We found spatial Stroop effects of similar size for the simple characters [symbol: see text] ("up") and [symbol: see text] ("down") and for the complex characters [symbol: see text] ("nervous") and [symbol: see text] ("nervous"), which are ideogrammic compounds containing a radical [symbol: see text] or [symbol: see text], in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 3, the spatial Stroop effects were also similar for the simple characters [symbol: see text] ("east") and [symbol: see text] ("west") and for the complex characters [symbol: see text] ("state") and [symbol: see text] ("spray"), which contain [symbol: see text] and [symbol: see text] as radicals. This outcome occurred regardless of whether the task was to identify the character (Exps. 1 and 3) or its location (Exp. 2). Thus, the spatial Stroop effect emerges in the processing of radicals just as it does for processing simple characters. This finding suggests that when reading ideogrammic compounds, (a) their radicals' meanings can be processed and (b) ideogrammic compounds have little or no influence on their radicals' semantic processing.

Background: Childhood schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that is believed to affect both conscious and unconscious cognitive functioning, but there have been few studies that have assessed this., Objective: Develop a version of the binocular rivalry test that will assess the conscious and unconscious cognitive processing of interpersonal information and use this test to determine whether or not social cognition is impaired in children with schizophrenia., Methods: Thirty images of three types - with no persons, with 2-3 persons and with 4+ persons - were selected for use in a binocular rivalry test that presented the images both in an interocularly suppressed (unconscious) format and an unsuppressed (conscious) format. Fifteen children under 16 years of age with schizophrenia who had prominent delusional symptoms and 15 healthy children were administered the test. Accuracy rates (in assessing the left or right orientation of a patch presented immediately after the target images) and reaction times were compared between patients and controls., Results: For all types of pictures, the accuracy of patients was less than that of controls, though the differences were only significant in two of the twelve comparisons assessed. Compared to controls, patients showed a non-significant increase in the attention paid to images with people in them compared to images without people in them, both for conscious and unconscious presentations of the images. We did not find any relationship between the severity of psychotic symptoms in the patients and the degree of impairment in the cognitive processing of images. When asked to assess the attributes of the images, patients reported significantly higher levels of happiness depicted in images with 2-3 people than controls., Conclusions: The non-significant increase in the attention children with schizophrenia paid to images depicting interpersonal relationships suggests, but does not prove, that the illness is associated with impairments in the cognitive processing of social information. Our use of the binocular rivalry paradigm to identify these differences was only partially successful, largely because of the wide variability in the key index from the test used to assess the amount of attention respondents pay to different types of images.

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) is a recently-developed approach for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analyses. Compared with the traditional univariate methods, MVPA is more sensitive to subtle changes in multivariate patterns in fMRI data. In this review, we introduce several significant advances in MVPA applications and summarize various combinations of algorithms and parameters in different problem settings. The limitations of MVPA and some critical questions that need to be addressed in future research are also discussed.

A fundamental issue in the study of reading is to understand the processes involved in determining word meaning from print. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and scanned participants performing lexical decision tasks to discriminate between real Chinese words and non-words, presented either visually or auditorily. For the visual task, two left inferior frontal cortical regions were significantly more activated for non-words than for words, one in BA (Brodmann's area) 44/45 implied in phonological processing, and one in BA47 implied in semantic processing. For the auditory task, stronger neural activity for non-words, relative to words, was only found in BA44/45 but not in BA47. The results were interpreted to suggest that printed words in Chinese can directly activate their semantic representations, independent of an indirect, mediated pathway through phonology. In reference to related imaging studies on English, our finding implies a greater reliance on orthography in Chinese reading., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The human visual system is extremely sensitive to biological signals around us. In the current study, we demonstrate that biological motion walking direction can induce robust reflexive attentional orienting. Following a brief presentation of a central point-light walker walking towards either the left or right direction, observers' performance was significantly better on a target in the walking direction compared with that in the opposite direction even when participants were explicitly told that walking direction was not predictive of target location. Interestingly, the effect disappeared when the walker was shown upside-down. Moreover, the reflexive attentional orienting could be extended to motions of other biological entities but not inanimate objects, and was not due to the viewpoint effect of the point-light figure. Our findings provide strong evidence that biological motion cues can trigger reflexive attentional orienting, and highlight the intrinsic sensitivity of the human visual attention system to biological signals., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The present study investigated whether offset cues have the same attentional consequences in the spatial Stroop effect as onset cues. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the attentional effects of onset-offset cues versus offset cues on the spatial Stroop effect, whereas Experiment 3 compared the attentional effects of onset versus offset cues. Across these experiments, independent of cue type (onset-offset or onset vs. offset) and even at long stimulus-onset asynchrony, attentional cueing did not revert into inhibition of return and was modulated by spatial Stroop with greater cueing effects for incongruent arrow's direction and position. In addition, onset-offset or onset and offset cues produced comparable cueing effects in the location-direction congruent condition, and onset-offset or onset cues produced greater facilitation than offset cues in the incongruent condition. From a different perspective, peripheral cueing modulated the spatial Stroop effect in the same direction for onset-offset or onset and offset cues, although the reduction in spatial Stroop at cued locations was smaller with offset than with onset-offset or onset cues.

Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that several brain regions--namely, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and the bilateral angular gyrus--are more active during resting states than during cognitive tasks (i.e., default mode network). Although there is evidence showing that the default mode network is associated with unconscious state, it is unclear whether this network is associated with unconscious processing when normal human subjects perform tasks without awareness. We manipulated the level of conscious processing in normal subjects by asking them to perform an implicit and an explicit memory task, and analyzed signal changes in the default mode network for the stimuli versus baseline in both tasks. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis showed that the level of activation in regions within this network during the implicit task was not significantly different from that during the baseline, except in the left angular gyrus and the insula. There was strong deactivation for the explicit task when compared with the implicit task in the default mode regions, except in the left angular gyrus and the left middle temporal gyrus. These data suggest that the activity in the default network is sustained and less disrupted when an implicit memory task is performed, but is suspended when explicit retrieval is required. These results provide evidence that the default mode network is associated with unconscious processing when human subjects perform an implicit memory task., (Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.)

It has been frequently reported that smokers showed attentional bias toward smoking-related stimuli. The current study aimed to examine whether such bias was also present when subjects were unaware of the presented stimuli and the possible role of awareness modulation on attentional bias. With a psychophysical approach (interocular suppression), we suppressed subjects' awareness to the cigarette pictures presented to one of their eyes. The visual dot probe task was modified to increase the perceptual load and to control the physical features between two rivaling images. Twenty-eight male smokers and 25 male non-smokers participated in the experiment. We found a significant interaction between experiment conditions and subject groups, with only the smoker group showed attentional bias toward cigarette pictures in unaware condition. Moreover, smokers' attentional bias in unaware condition was negatively correlated with their scores on Cigarette Dependence Scale while their attentional bias in aware condition was positively correlated with scores on Questionnaires of Smoking Urges. Such dissociation indicates the possibility of awareness modulation on attentional bias: it is possible that in aware condition, the attentional bias was modulated by smoking urge in awareness, thus concealed the effect of dependence degree. Further studies indicated that awareness modulated attentional bias through many factors, such as craving, quit attempt, attitude and disgust. Interestingly, non-smokers also showed attentional bias in aware condition, which further suggested that due to awareness modulation, attentional bias could even be addiction-unrelated.

To explore the temporal features and underlying brain structures of self-referential processing, participants were shown examples of Chinese handwriting, half of which were their own and the other half belonged to others, and asked to judge whether the handwriting was their own. In Experiment 1, the task was to categorize the handwriting by pressing the correct key as quickly as possible. In Experiment 2, after the participants recognized the stimuli, they were required to gaze at the handwriting for 3000 msec before making a response rather than responding immediately after stimulus onset. The results showed prominent differences in event-related potentials elicited by own and other handwriting conditions in the 200-500 msec and 1000-2000 msec time windows. Dipole analyses of the difference waves, own minus other, were conducted in both of these time windows. There were two dipoles in the 200-500 msec time window localized to the medial-temporal lobe and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and MTL activation preceded ACC activation. Only one dipole at the posterior cingulate cortex was fitted to the 1000-2000 msec time window. These structures were activated sequentially in a temporal course, which provides evidence that the cortex middle structures potentially form a specific self-related processing unit, which is involved in processing various aspects of the self.

In this work, the spatiotemporal nonlinearity in resting-state fMRI data of the human brain was detected by nonlinear dynamics methods. Nine human subjects during resting state were imaged using single-shot gradient echo planar imaging on a 1.5T scanner. Eigenvalue spectra for the covariance matrix, correlation dimensions and Spatiotemporal Lyapunov Exponents were calculated to detect the spatiotemporal nonlinearity in resting-state fMRI data. By simulating, adjusting, and comparing the eigenvalue spectra of pure correlated noise with the corresponding real fMRI data, the intrinsic dimensionality was estimated. The intrinsic dimensionality was used to extract the first few principal components from the real fMRI data using Principal Component Analysis, which will preserve the correct phase dynamics, while reducing both computational load and noise level of the data. Then the phase-space was reconstructed using the time-delay embedding method for their principal components and the correlation dimension was estimated by the Grassberger-Procaccia algorithm of multiple variable series. The Spatiotemporal Lyapunov Exponents were calculated by using the method based on coupled map lattices. Through nonlinearity testing, there are significant differences of correlation dimensions and Spatiotemporal Lyapunov Exponents between fMRI data and their surrogate data. The fractal dimension and the positive Spatiotemporal Lyapunov Exponents characterize the spatiotemporal nonlinear dynamics property of resting-state fMRI data. Therefore, the results suggest that fluctuations presented in resting state may be an inherent model of basal neural activation of human brain, cannot be fully attributed to noise.

Our previous ERP studies have consistently demonstrated that a negativity N270 elicited by incongruent information in visual S1-S2 matching task represents a type of conflict process, which is distinct from that represented by the classic conflict task or other negative components in delayed matching-to-sample stimulus presentation patterns, since the inter-stimulus interval between S1 and S2 was presented as shorter as 500 ms. The N270 component of ERP was shown to reflect conflict processing during the simple working memory operations. In the present study, a functional MRI (fMRI) was used to investigate the visuospatial characteristics of brain activation associated with the task eliciting N270. The fMRI data showed an increased activation in the right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC, BA 24) and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, BA 46), and activation biased to the left occipitotemporal cortex (BA 37) in the incongruent condition. It is suggested that the greater activations of the right ACC coupling with right DLPFC to incongruent task reflect functional efficiency of the right cingulo-prefrontal network during the brief visual delayed period discrimination performance and mismatched information processing.

Objectives: To identify the cortical areas engaged during Chinese word processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and to examine the reliability and reproducibility of fMRI for localization of functional areas in the human brain., Methods: FMRI data were collected on 8 young, right-handed, native Chinese speakers during performance of Chinese synonym and homophone judgment tasks on two different clinical MRI systems (1.5 T GE Signa Horizon and 1.5 T Siemens Vision). A cross correlation analysis was used to statistically generate the activation map., Results: Broca's area, Wernicke's area, bilateral extrastriate, and ventral temporal cortex were significantly activated during both the synonym and homophone activities. There was essentially no difference between results acquired on two different MRI systems., Conclusions: FMRI can be used for localizing cortical areas critical to Chinese language processing in the human brain. The results are reliable and well reproducible across different clinical MRI systems.