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Neuropsychologia Feb 2023Healthy observers recognize more accurately same-than other-race faces (i.e., the Same-Race Recognition Advantage - SRRA) but categorize them by race more slowly than...
Healthy observers recognize more accurately same-than other-race faces (i.e., the Same-Race Recognition Advantage - SRRA) but categorize them by race more slowly than other-race faces (i.e., the Other-Race Categorization Advantage - ORCA). Several fMRI studies reported discrepant bilateral activations in the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and Occipital Face Area (OFA) correlating with both effects. However, due to the very nature and limits of fMRI results, whether these face-sensitive regions play an unequivocal causal role in those other-race effects remains to be clarified. To this aim, we tested PS, a well-studied pure case of acquired prosopagnosia with lesions encompassing the left FFA and the right OFA. PS, healthy age-matched and young adults performed two recognition and three categorization by race tasks, respectively using Western Caucasian and East Asian faces normalized for their low-level properties with and without-external features, as well as in naturalistic settings. As expected, PS was slower and less accurate than the controls. Crucially, however, the magnitudes of her SRRA and ORCA were comparable to the controls in all the tasks. Our data show that prosopagnosia does not abolish other-race effects, as an intact face system, the left FFA and/or right OFA are not critical for eliciting the SRRA and ORCA. Race is a strong visual and social signal that is encoded in a large neural face-sensitive network, robustly tuned for processing same-race faces.
Topics: Female; Humans; Young Adult; Cerebral Cortex; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Prosopagnosia; Recognition, Psychology; White People; East Asian People
PubMed: 36623806
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108479 -
Neuropsychologia Jun 2024Facial identity recognition (FIR) is arguably the ultimate form of recognition for the adult human brain. Even if the term prosopagnosia is reserved for exceptionally... (Review)
Review
Facial identity recognition (FIR) is arguably the ultimate form of recognition for the adult human brain. Even if the term prosopagnosia is reserved for exceptionally rare brain-damaged cases with a category-specific abrupt loss of FIR at adulthood, subjective and objective impairments or difficulties of FIR are common in the neuropsychological population. Here we provide a critical overview of the evaluation of FIR both for clinicians and researchers in neuropsychology. FIR impairments occur following many causes that should be identified objectively by both general and specific, behavioral and neural examinations. We refute the commonly used dissociation between perceptual and memory deficits/tests for FIR, since even a task involving the discrimination of unfamiliar face images presented side-by-side relies on cortical memories of faces in the right-lateralized ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Another frequently encountered confusion is between specific deficits of the FIR function and a more general impairment of semantic memory (of people), the latter being most often encountered following anterior temporal lobe damage. Many computerized tests aimed at evaluating FIR have appeared over the last two decades, as reviewed here. However, despite undeniable strengths, they often suffer from ecological limitations, difficulties of instruction, as well as a lack of consideration for processing speed and qualitative information. Taking into account these issues, a recently developed behavioral test with natural images manipulating face familiarity, stimulus inversion, and correct response times as a key variable appears promising. The measurement of electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in the frequency domain from fast periodic visual stimulation also appears as a particularly promising tool to complete and enhance the neuropsychological assessment of FIR.
Topics: Humans; Facial Recognition; Neuropsychological Tests; Prosopagnosia; Recognition, Psychology; Electroencephalography
PubMed: 38522782
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2024.108865 -
Cureus Sep 2023Kluver-Bucy Syndrome (KBS) is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by hyperorality, hypersexuality, bulimia, visual agnosia, and amnesia due to lesions... (Review)
Review
Kluver-Bucy Syndrome (KBS) is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by hyperorality, hypersexuality, bulimia, visual agnosia, and amnesia due to lesions affecting bilateral temporal lobes. It is attributed to a multitude of causes, including stroke, herpes simplex encephalitis, Alzheimer's disease, and head trauma. Current treatments for KBS include symptomatic management with antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, carbamazepine, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The bibliometric analysis was done to reflect the relevance and understanding of KBS in recent literature. The SCOPUS database was utilized to conduct a search for all articles with the terms "Kluver-Bucy" and "Kluver Bucy" from January 1, 1955 (the first available articles from the search) to February 1, 2023. The parameters included in this analysis were article title, citation numbers, citations per year, authors, institutions, publishing journals, country of origin, Source Normalized Impact per Paper, and Scopus CiteScore. Since 1937, when Kluver-Bucy Syndrome was first defined, the publications on KBS have steadily increased, with up to six publications a year in 2002. The most common institutions were SUNY Upstate Medical University, VA Medical Center, and the State University of New York (SUNY) System. Seven of these papers were published in . Almost 75% of the articles were published in journals of medicine and neuroscience. This is the first bibliometric analysis to evaluate the most influential publications about Kluver-Bucy Syndrome. A majority of the research is case-based and there is a dearth of clinical trials to identify the exact pathophysiology and physiotherapy management, possibly owing to the rarity of the disease. Our research suggests that there may be a significant overlap between Sanfilippo syndrome and KBS, suggesting that refined guidelines for establishing diagnosis may be required for children. Our study could bring a renewed interest in this field and lead to additional research focused on understanding the pathophysiology of KBS in order to promote the development of novel diagnostics and treatment.
PubMed: 37854727
DOI: 10.7759/cureus.45382 -
Cell Death Discovery Mar 2024Pancreatic cancer is a malignant tumor of the digestive system. It is highly aggressive, easily metastasizes, and extremely difficult to treat. This study aimed to...
Pancreatic cancer is a malignant tumor of the digestive system. It is highly aggressive, easily metastasizes, and extremely difficult to treat. This study aimed to analyze the genes that might regulate pancreatic cancer migration to provide an essential basis for the prognostic assessment of pancreatic cancer and individualized treatment. A CRISPR knockout library directed against 915 murine genes was transfected into TB 32047 cell line to screen which gene loss promoted cell migration. Next-generation sequencing and PinAPL.py- analysis was performed to identify candidate genes. We then assessed the effect of serine/threonine kinase 11 (STK11) knockout on pancreatic cancer by wound-healing assay, chick agnosia (CAM) assay, and orthotopic mouse pancreatic cancer model. We performed RNA sequence and Western blotting for mechanistic studies to identify and verify the pathways. After accelerated Transwell migration screening, STK11 was identified as one of the top candidate genes. Further experiments showed that targeted knockout of STK11 promoted the cell migration and increased liver metastasis in mice. Mechanistic analyses revealed that STK11 knockout influences blood vessel morphogenesis and is closely associated with the enhanced expression of phosphodiesterases (PDEs), especially PDE4D, PDE4B, and PDE10A. PDE4 inhibitor Roflumilast inhibited STK11-KO cell migration and tumor size, further demonstrating that PDEs are essential for STK11-deficient cell migration. Our findings support the adoption of therapeutic strategies, including Roflumilast, for patients with STK11-mutated pancreatic cancer in order to improve treatment efficacy and ultimately prolong survival.
PubMed: 38461159
DOI: 10.1038/s41420-024-01890-y -
Neuropsychologia May 2018The cognitive organisation of nonverbal auditory knowledge remains poorly defined. Deficits of environmental sound as well as word and visual object knowledge are...
The cognitive organisation of nonverbal auditory knowledge remains poorly defined. Deficits of environmental sound as well as word and visual object knowledge are well-recognised in semantic dementia. However, it is unclear how auditory cognition breaks down in this disorder and how this relates to deficits in other knowledge modalities. We had the opportunity to study a patient with a typical syndrome of semantic dementia who had extensive premorbid knowledge of birds, allowing us to assess the impact of the disease on the processing of auditory in relation to visual and verbal attributes of this specific knowledge category. We designed a novel neuropsychological test to probe knowledge of particular avian characteristics (size, behaviour [migratory or nonmigratory], habitat [whether or not primarily water-dwelling]) in the nonverbal auditory, visual and verbal modalities, based on a uniform two-alternative-forced-choice procedure. The patient's performance was compared to healthy older individuals of similar birding experience. We further compared his performance on this test of bird knowledge with his knowledge of familiar human voices and faces. Relative to healthy birder controls, the patient showed marked deficits of bird call and bird name knowledge but relatively preserved knowledge of avian visual attributes and retained knowledge of human voices and faces. In both the auditory and visual modalities, his knowledge of the avian characteristics of size and behaviour was intact whereas his knowledge of the associated characteristic of habitat was deficient. This case provides further evidence that nonverbal auditory knowledge has a fractionated organisation that can be differentially targeted in semantic dementia.
Topics: Acoustic Stimulation; Aged; Agnosia; Animals; Auditory Perception; Birds; Female; Humans; Knowledge; Male; Middle Aged; Photic Stimulation; Recognition, Psychology; Semantics; Sound
PubMed: 29572063
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.03.024 -
F1000Research 2019Prosopagnosia is an impairment in the ability to recognize faces and can be acquired after a brain lesion or occur as a developmental variant. Studies of prosopagnosia... (Review)
Review
Prosopagnosia is an impairment in the ability to recognize faces and can be acquired after a brain lesion or occur as a developmental variant. Studies of prosopagnosia make important contributions to our understanding of face processing and object recognition in the human visual system. We review four areas of advances in the study of this condition in recent years. First are issues surrounding the diagnosis of prosopagnosia, including the development and evaluation of newer tests and proposals for diagnostic criteria, especially for the developmental variant. Second are studies of the structural basis of prosopagnosia, including the application of more advanced neuroimaging techniques in studies of the developmental variant. Third are issues concerning the face specificity of the defect in prosopagnosia, namely whether other object processing is affected to some degree and in particular the status of visual word processing in light of recent predictions from the "many-to-many hypothesis". Finally, there have been recent rehabilitative trials of perceptual learning applied to larger groups of prosopagnosic subjects that show that face impairments are not immutable in this condition.
Topics: Facial Recognition; Humans; Learning; Neuroimaging; Prosopagnosia
PubMed: 31231507
DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.18492.1 -
Brain : a Journal of Neurology Feb 2023Neurodevelopmental disorders are categorized and studied according to their manifestations as distinct syndromes. For instance, congenital prosopagnosia and dyslexia...
Neurodevelopmental disorders are categorized and studied according to their manifestations as distinct syndromes. For instance, congenital prosopagnosia and dyslexia have largely non-overlapping research literatures and clinical pathways for diagnosis and intervention. On the other hand, the high incidence of neurodevelopmental comorbidities or co-existing extreme strengths and weaknesses suggest that transdiagnostic commonalities may be greater than currently appreciated. The core-periphery model holds that brain regions within the stable core perceptual and motor regions are more densely connected to one another compared to regions in the flexible periphery comprising multimodal association regions. This model provides a framework for the interpretation of neural data in normal development and clinical disorders. Considering network-level commonalities reported in studies of neurodevelopmental disorders, variability in multimodal association cortex connectivity may reflect a shared origin of seemingly distinct neurodevelopmental disorders. This framework helps to explain both comorbidities in neurodevelopmental disorders and profiles of strengths and weaknesses attributable to competitive processing between cognitive systems within an individual.
Topics: Humans; Neurodevelopmental Disorders; Brain; Cerebral Cortex; Dyslexia; Prosopagnosia; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Neural Pathways
PubMed: 36299249
DOI: 10.1093/brain/awac387 -
Frontiers in Endocrinology 2020Emotional deprivation can lead to growth faltering of infants and children. The mechanism(s) involved differ in that for infants, the major metabolic problem is... (Review)
Review
Emotional deprivation can lead to growth faltering of infants and children. The mechanism(s) involved differ in that for infants, the major metabolic problem is inadequate energy intake for growth. In young children, it is likely that the emotional deprivation causes a syndrome not only of growth faltering, but with bizarre behaviors, especially with regard to food: hoarding, gorging and vomiting, hyperphagia, drinking from the toilet, and eating from garbage pails. Other disturbed behaviors include, poor sleep, night wanderings, and pain agnosia. The pathophysiology appears to be reversible hypopituitarism, at least for the growth hormone and hypothalamic-pituitary- adrenal axes. The review begins with an historical perspective concerning stress, children and growth and then moves to the issue of hospitalism, where young infants failed to thrive (and died) due to inadequate stimulation and energy intake. Refeeding programs at the end of World Wars I and II noted that some children did not thrive despite an adequate energy intake. It appeared that in addition taking care of their emotional needs permitted super-physiologic (catch-up) growth. Next came the first notions from clinical investigation that hypopituitarism might be the mechanism of growth faltering. Studies that address this mechanism from a number of observational and clinical research studies are reviewed in depth to show that the hypopituitarism was relieved upon removal from the deprivational environment and occurred much too quickly to be due to adequate energy alone. These findings are then compared to those from malnourished children and adoptees from emerging countries, especially those from orphanages where their psychosocial needs were unmet despite adequate caloric intake. Together, these various conditions define one aspect of the field of psychoneuroendocrinology.
Topics: Affective Symptoms; Child; Failure to Thrive; Humans; Hypopituitarism
PubMed: 33117295
DOI: 10.3389/fendo.2020.596144 -
Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation... Jun 2017This review article summarizes neuropsychological descriptions of abnormal body representations in brain-damaged patients and recent neuroscientific investigations of... (Review)
Review
This review article summarizes neuropsychological descriptions of abnormal body representations in brain-damaged patients and recent neuroscientific investigations of their sensorimotor underpinnings in healthy participants. The first part of the article describes unilateral disorders of the bodily self, such as asomatognosia, feelings of amputation, supernumerary phantom limbs and somatoparaphrenia, as well as descriptions of non-lateralized disorders of the bodily self, including Alice in Wonderland syndrome and autoscopic hallucinations. Because the sensorimotor mechanisms of these disorders are unclear, we focus on clinical descriptions and insist on the importance of reporting clinical cases to better understand the full range of bodily disorders encountered in neurological diseases. The second part of the article presents the advantages of merging neuroscientific approaches of the bodily self with immersive virtual reality, robotics and neuroprosthetics to foster the understanding of the multisensory, motor and neural mechanisms of bodily representations.
Topics: Agnosia; Alice in Wonderland Syndrome; Body Image; Brain Injuries; Delusions; Depersonalization; Hallucinations; Humans; Phantom Limb; Robotics; Virtual Reality
PubMed: 27318928
DOI: 10.1016/j.rehab.2016.04.007 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Apr 2024Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is characterised by difficulties recognising face identities and is associated with diverse co-occurring object recognition...
Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is characterised by difficulties recognising face identities and is associated with diverse co-occurring object recognition difficulties. The high co-occurrence rate and heterogeneity of associated difficulties in DP is an intrinsic feature of developmental conditions, where co-occurrence of difficulties is the rule, rather than the exception. However, despite its name, cognitive and neural theories of DP rarely consider the developmental context in which these difficulties occur. This leaves a large gap in our understanding of how DP emerges in light of the developmental trajectory of face recognition. Here, we argue that progress in the field requires re-considering the developmental origins of differences in face recognition abilities, rather than studying the end-state alone. In practice, considering development in DP necessitates a re-evaluation of current approaches in recruitment, design, and analyses.
Topics: Humans; Prosopagnosia; Facial Recognition; Visual Perception; Pattern Recognition, Visual
PubMed: 38460488
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.02.006