Objectives: Converging evidence indicates beneficial effects of aerobic exercise on motor learning performance. Underlying mechanisms might be an impact of aerobic exercise on neuroplasticity and cortical excitability. Evidence suggests that motor learning and cortical excitability alterations correlate with the intensity of aerobic exercise and the activity level of participants. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of different aerobic exercise intensities on motor learning and cortical excitability in sedentary individuals. Methods : The study was conducted in a cross-over and double-blind design. 26 healthy sedentary individuals (13 women and 13 men) performed a motor learning task and received cortical excitability assessment before and after a single session of low-, moderate-, high-intensity aerobic exercise or a control intervention. Results : The study revealed that motor learning performance and cortical excitability were significantly enhanced in the moderate-intensity aerobic exerci...

Most human navigation studies in MRI rely on virtual navigation. However, the necessary supine position in MRI makes it fundamentally different from daily ecological navigation. Nonetheless, until now, no study has assessed whether differences in physical body orientation (BO) affect participants’ experienced BO during virtual navigation. Here, combining an immersive virtual reality (VR) navigation task with subjective BO measures and implicit behavioral measures, we demonstrate that physical BO (either standing or supine) modulates experienced BO. Also, we show that standing upright BO is preferred during spatial navigation: participants were more likely to experience a standing BO and were better at spatial navigation when standing upright. Importantly, we report that showing a supine virtual agent reduces the conflict between the preferred BO and physical supine BO. Our study provides critical, but missing, information regarding experienced BO during virtual navigation, which should be considered cautio...

Objective: To develop a deep learning-based automatic system with reliable performance in detecting interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) from scalp electroencephalograms (EEGs). Methods: For the present study, 484 raw scalp EEG recordings were included, standardized, and split into 406 for training and 78 for testing. Two neurophysiologists individually annotated the recordings for training in channel-wise manner. Annotations were divided into segments, on which 9 deep neural networks (DNNs) were trained for the multi-classification of IED, artifact and background. The fitted IED detectors were then evaluated on 78 EEG recordings with IED events fully annotated by 3 experts independently (majority agreement). A two-montage-based decision mechanism (TMDM) was designed to determine whether an IED event occurred at a single time instant. Area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC), as well as false positive rates, F1 scores, and Kappa agreement scores for sensitivity = 0.8 were estimated. Results: In...

Working memory (WM) can maintain sequential and concurrent information, and the load enhances the γ band oscillation during the delay period. To provide a unified account for these phenomena in working memory, we investigated a continuous network model consisting of pyramidal cells, high-threshold fast-spiking interneurons (FS), and low-threshold nonfast-spiking interneurons (nFS) for working memory of sequential and concurrent directional cues. Our model exhibits the γ (30–100 Hz) and β (10–30 Hz) band oscillation during the retention of both concurrent cues and sequential cues. We found that the β oscillation results from the interaction between pyramidal cells and nFS, whereas the γ oscillation emerges from the interaction between pyramidal cells and FS because of the strong excitation elicited by cue presentation, shedding light on the mechanism underlying the enhancement of γ power in many cognitive executions.

Rhythms are a common feature of brain activity. Across different types of rhythms, the phase has been proposed to have functional consequences, thus requiring its accurate specification from noisy data. Phase is conventionally specified using techniques that presume a frequency band-limited rhythm. However, in practice, observed brain rhythms are typically nonsinusoidal and amplitude modulated. How these features impact methods to estimate phase remains unclear. To address this, we consider three phase estimation methods, each with different underlying assumptions about the rhythm. We apply these methods to rhythms simulated with different generative mechanisms and demonstrate inconsistency in phase estimates across the different methods. We propose two improvements to the practice of phase estimation: (1) estimating confidence in the phase estimate, and (2) examining the consistency of phase estimates between two (or more) methods.

Sympathetic preganglionic neurons (SPNs) are the final output neurons from the central arm of the autonomic nervous system. Therefore, SPNs represent a crucial component of the sympathetic nervous system for integrating several inputs before driving the postganglionic neurons (PGNs) in the periphery to control end organ function. The mechanisms which establish and regulate baseline sympathetic tone and overall excitability of SPNs and PGNs are poorly understood. The SPNs are also known as the autonomic motoneurons (MNs) as they arise from the same progenitor line as somatic MNs that innervate skeletal muscles. Previously our group has identified a rich repertoire of homeostatic plasticity (HP) mechanisms in somatic MNs of the embryonic chick following in vivo synaptic blockade. Here, using the same model system, we examined whether SPNs exhibit similar homeostatic capabilities to that of somatic MNs. Indeed, we found that after 2-d reduction of excitatory synaptic input, SPNs showed a significant increase ...

Brains implement some of the most complex functions of living systems including intelligence, decision-making, learning, and sentience, which is the capacity for subjective experience. To better understand these and other cognitive functions, neuroscientists have meticulously delineated the brain’s microcircuitry and pathways to relate mental phenomena with discrete neural substrates. One of the driving forces behind what has become an ever-expanding literature on functional neuroanatomy is the longstanding assumption that all mental actions and states can be localized, mapped, or otherwise attributed to specific configurations of brain matter. Consistent with this assumption, by selectively damaging or stimulating brain regions, one could suppress or evoke cognitive or behavioral responses that confirmed suspected structure-function relationships. While this approach has not helped explain why mind emerges from matter, its historical success is a crowning achievement for the field of cognitive neuroscienc...

Chronic stress has been considered to induce depressive symptoms, such as anhedonia, particularly in susceptible individuals. Synaptic plasticity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is closely associated with susceptibility or resilience to chronic stress-induced anhedonia. However, effects of chronic stress with different durations on the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie susceptibility to anhedonia remain unclear. The present study investigated effects of chronic mild stress (CMS) for 14, 21, and 35 d on anhedonia-like behavior and glutamate synapses in the PFC. We found that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels in the PFC significantly decreased only in anhedonia-susceptible rats that were exposed to CMS for 14, 21, and 35 d. Additionally, 14 d of CMS increased prefrontal glutamate release, and 35 d of CMS decreased glutamate release, in addition to reducing synaptic proteins and spine density in the PFC. Moreover, we found that anhedonia-like behavior in a subset of rats spontaneously decr...

Mitochondria are integrative hubs central to cellular adaptive pathways. Such pathways are critical in highly differentiated postmitotic neurons, the plasticity of which sustains brain function. Consequently, defects in mitochondria and in their dynamics appear instrumental in neurodegenerative diseases and may also participate in cognitive impairments. To directly test this hypothesis, we analyzed cognitive performances in a mouse mitochondria-based disease model, because of haploinsufficiency in the mitochondrial optic atrophy type 1 (OPA1) protein involved in mitochondrial dynamics. In males, we evaluated adult hippocampal neurogenesis parameters using immunohistochemistry. We performed a battery of tests to assess basal behavioral characteristics and cognitive performances, and tested putative treatments. While in dominant optic atrophy (DOA) mouse models, the known main symptoms are late onset visual deficits, we discovered early impairments in hippocampus-dependent spatial memory attributable to defe...

Animals exhibit context-dependent behavioral decisions that are mediated by specific motor circuits. In social species these decisions are often influenced by social status. Although social status-dependent neural plasticity of motor circuits has been investigated in vertebrates, little is known of how cellular plasticity translates into differences in motor activity. Here, we used zebrafish ( Danio rerio ) as a model organism to examine how social dominance influences the activation of swimming and the Mauthner-mediated startle escape behaviors. We show that the status-dependent shift in behavior patterns whereby dominants increase swimming and reduce sensitivity of startle escape while subordinates reduce their swimming and increase startle sensitivity is regulated by the synergistic interactions of dopaminergic, glycinergic, and GABAergic inputs to shift the balance of activation of the underlying motor circuits. This shift is driven by socially induced differences in expression of dopaminergic receptor...