Sex differences in mental rotation and cortical activation patterns: Can training change them?

Intelligence ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norbert Jaušovec ◽  
Ksenija Jaušovec
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukas Brenner ◽  
Leah Zerlin ◽  
Linette Liqi Tan

AbstractVisceral pain is a highly complex experience and is the most common pathological feature in patients suffering from inflammatory gastrointestinal disorders. Whilst it is increasingly recognized that aberrant neural processing within the gut-brain axis plays a key role in development of neurological symptoms, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated the cortical activation patterns and effects of non-invasive chemogenetic suppression of cortical activity on visceral hypersensitivity and anxiety-related phenotypes in a well-characterized mouse model of acute colitis induced by dextran sulfate sodium (DSS). We found that within the widespread cortical network, the mid-cingulate cortex (MCC) was consistently highly activated in response to innocuous and noxious mechanical stimulation of the colon. Furthermore, during acute experimental colitis, impairing the activity of the MCC successfully alleviated visceral hypersensitivity, anxiety-like behaviors and visceromotor responses to colorectal distensions (CRDs) via downregulating the excitability of the posterior insula (PI), somatosensory and the rostral anterior cingulate cortices (rACC), but not the prefrontal or anterior insula cortices. These results provide a mechanistic insight into the central cortical circuits underlying painful visceral manifestations and implicate MCC plasticity as a putative target in cingulate-mediated therapies for bowel disorders.


2018 ◽  
Vol 247 ◽  
pp. 57-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reid A. Mitchell ◽  
Michele R. Schaeffer ◽  
Andrew H. Ramsook ◽  
Sabrina S. Wilkie ◽  
Jordan A. Guenette

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryanne L. Fisher ◽  
Tami Meredith ◽  
Melissa Gray

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lace Padilla

The Morris water maze is a task adapted from the animal spatial cognition literature and has been studied in the context of sex differences in humans, particularly because of the standard design, which manipulates proximal (close) and distal (far) cues. However, there are mixed findings with respect to the interaction of cues and sex differences in virtual Morris water maze tasks, which may be attributed to variations in the scale of the space and previously unmeasured individual differences. We explore the question of scale and context by presenting participants with an outdoor virtual Morris water maze that is four times the size of the mazes previously tested. We also measured lifetime mobility and mental rotation skills. Results of this study suggest that for the small-scale environment, males and females performed similarly when asked to navigate with only proximal cues. However, males outperformed females when only distal cues were visible. In the large-scale environment, males outperformed females in both cue conditions. Additionally, greater mental rotation skills predicted better navigation performance with proximal cues only. Finally, we found that highly mobile females and males perform equally well when navigating with proximal cues.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Joshi ◽  
Benjamin Weedon ◽  
Patrick Esser ◽  
Yan-Ci Liu ◽  
Daniella Springett ◽  
...  

NeuroImage ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. S175 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Halgren ◽  
J.D. Lewine ◽  
K. Marinkovic ◽  
R.L. Buckner ◽  
K.M. Paulson ◽  
...  

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