A M Owen

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..Recent studies show that activity in the posterior parietal cortex increases with working memory load, implicating this region in the storage of representations in visual memory...

..In this article, I review these data, focusing primarily on the vegetative and minimally conscious states...

..We discuss recent developments in the use of neuroimaging and, in particular, functional MRI, in the assessment of patients diagnosed as vegetative state or minimally conscious state...

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..When asked to imagine playing tennis or moving around her home, the patient activated predicted cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of healthy volunteers...

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..As a direct result, it has been possible to redefine impairments of executive function in Parkinson's disease more precisely in terms of the specific neuropsychological, neuroanatomical, and psychopharmacological mechanisms involved...

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..Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained, no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related...

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..These results suggest that encoding and retrieval may actually involve similar regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex when all factors relating to the type of stimulus material (i.e. modality), are appropriately controlled...

..These findings help to clarify the complimentary role that the mid-VLPFC and posterior higher visual areas play in controlled and relatively automatic memory processing...

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..The aim of this study was to examine the role of the reward system in such eating behaviour, in terms of both the pattern of food preferences and the neural substrates of incentive in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)...

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..We discuss the implications for investigation and optimal treatment of this common condition at different stages of disease...

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..These results have implications for our understanding of the neural correlates of perceptual and semantic contributions to recognition memory...

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..The present results clarify and extend recent attempts to understand the neural basis of semantic memory retrieval, by actively controlling for the confounding effects of episodic memory encoding and retrieval processes...

..e., modality), are appropriately controlled...

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..Overall, these data concur with findings in rodents and nonhuman primates of reversal-learning deficits after damage to ventral frontostriatal circuitry, and also support recent clinical findings using this task...

..To investigate the heterogeneity of idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) in a data driven manner among a cohort of patients in the early clinical stages of the disease meeting established diagnostic criteria...

..However, caution is required when comparing groups or drug effects in terms of the connectivity parameter estimates, if there are significant posterior covariances among parameters...

..Finally, only limited support was found for the hypothesis that cognitive aging depends on slowed information processing...

..These tasks include the choices we make about our behavior...

..The results show different degrees of target selectivity across different regions of the frontoparietal network...

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..These distributed changes in task-related cortical networks arise from subjects' representations of future events and likelihood of reward...

..The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is also affected during problem solving, but age-related decline within this region appears to occur at a later stage...

..This result suggests that the memory-related asymmetries observed during functional neuroimaging studies may not be critical for task performance...

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..These results provide further evidence that a subset of patients fulfilling the behavioural criteria for the vegetative state retain islands of preserved cognitive function...

..The results show that, even when memory demand decreases, organization of working memory contents into higher level chunks is associated with increased prefrontal activity...

..These results have important implications for understanding the relationship between speech comprehension and awareness in the healthy brain in patients receiving sedation and in patients with disorders of consciousness...

..In recent years, the results of neuroimaging studies have fundamentally changed the way we think about the vegetative and minimally conscious states...

..This effect is dopamine dependant, and may in part explain the clinical observation of reduced dopamine responsiveness in older patients with PD...

..Our results reveal that the RIFG is recruited when important cues are detected, regardless of whether that detection is followed by the inhibition of a motor response, the generation of a motor response, or no external response at all...

..This paradigm thus exemplifies the potential for fMRI to explore high-level cognitive functions, and awareness, in the absence of any behavioral response...

..These results suggest that there is a developmental progression in the degree to which different mechanisms of 'learning to like' are important over the life span...

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..These data suggest that L-dopa ameliorates high-level cognitive deficits in Parkinson's disease by inducing relative blood flow changes in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex...

..These findings support the hypothesis that the right IFG responds selectively to those items that are of the most relevance to the currently intended task schema...

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..Additional subtraction contrasts largely confirmed these patterns. Our results demonstrate a considerable degree of overlap between the medial frontal areas involved in eye gaze processing and theory of mind tasks...

..Recent evidence from functional magnetic imaging studies suggests that a network of frontal and parietal regions plays a crucial role...

..It is suggested, however, that the patient deficit reflects strategic or goal-based dysfunction, rather than storage limitations...

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..These problems cause uncertainty in localization, which limits the effective resolution of functional imaging, especially for brain areas involved in higher cognitive function...

..These results confirm that working memory deficits in PD are both psychologically specific and related to dopamine depletion. It is anticipated that greater understanding of these mechanisms will lead to future therapeutic improvements...

..These results suggest an essential and specific role for the caudate nucleus in executive function, which may underlie the cognitive disturbances observed in frontostriatal neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease...

..While the results are discussed in terms of a frontal system involved in the voluntary maintenance of performance under conditions of low stimulation, alternative accounts in terms of strategy application are considered...

..We conclude that a prefrontal-parietal network is involved in strategic recoding in working memory, regardless of the type of recoding process...

..The findings of this study have implications for research into the underlying mechanisms of eating disorders...

..Thus, the lateral prefrontal cortex appears to play a general role in strategically recoding information from memory, in order to optimize performance...

..Furthermore, they suggest that fMRI may provide a valuable tool for identifying patients who may benefit from targeted therapeutic strategies...

..Even without behavior to control, these classical "control" regions are active in simple update of attended information...

..The results also suggest that performance on the Tower of London task may prove to be a useful discriminant variable in defining the nature of cognitive heterogeneity in Parkinson's disease...

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..Recent evidence from electroencephalogram recordings suggests that one crucial component of this variation is our ability to exclude irrelevant information...

..These findings support a primarily attribute-based neural organisation of semantic knowledge...

..Recent evidence from behavioural studies in cats suggests that working memory may be crucial...

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..Preliminary results in a small series of patients provide a strong basis for the systematic study of possible residual cognitive function in persistent vegetative state...

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..To investigate the neural basis of the abnormal eating behaviour in Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), using brain imaging. We predicted that the satiety response in those with PWS would be delayed and insensitive to food intake...

..This double dissociation provides clear evidence that, in humans as in other animals, reward-related learning (conditioned reward) critically depends on a circuit involving inferotemporal cortex and the ANC...

..The rate of misdiagnosis is approximately 40%, and new methods are required to complement bedside testing, particularly if the patient's capacity to show behavioral signs of awareness is diminished...

..These results suggest different roles for lateral and medial anterior prefrontal cortex in recollection...

..To examine whether euthymic bipolar patients engage similar or contrasting brain regions as healthy subjects when responding to implicit affect induction...

..Finally, we turn to a number of new directions and recent studies exploring different aspects of planning and problem solving and their association to related cognitive dimensions...

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..Lateral regions seem to be more involved in the early retrieval specification stages of recollection, with medial regions contributing to later stages (e.g., monitoring and verification)...

..The purpose of the study was to develop a strategy for functional imaging of neurodegenerative disorders that overcomes confounds associated with differential performance between patient and comparison groups...

..We discuss the problems of evidence-based neurorehabilitation in disorders of consciousness, and recent functional neuroimaging data obtained in the vegetative state and minimally conscious state...

..Neuroimaging techniques remain important tools for clinical research that will extend our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of these disorders...

..These findings have implications for establishing appropriate methods to operate BCI systems, particularly for disabled people who may experience difficulty with motor tasks, even motor imagery...