Adaptation to Visuomotor Rotation and Force Field Perturbation Is Correlated to Different Brain Areas in Patients With Cerebellar Degeneration

2009 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 1961-1971 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Rabe ◽  
O. Livne ◽  
E. R. Gizewski ◽  
V. Aurich ◽  
A. Beck ◽  
...  

Although it is widely agreed that the cerebellum is necessary for learning and consolidation of new motor tasks, it is not known whether adaptation to kinematic and dynamic errors is processed by the same cerebellar areas or whether different parts play a decisive role. We investigated arm movements in a visuomotor (VM) rotation and a force field (FF) perturbation task in 14 participants with cerebellar degeneration and 14 age- and gender-matched controls. Magnetic resonance images were used to calculate the volume of cerebellar areas (medial, intermediate, and lateral zones of the anterior and posterior lobes) and to identify cerebellar structure important for the two tasks. Corroborating previous studies, cerebellar participants showed deficits in adaptation to both tasks compared with controls ( P < 0.001). However, it was not possible to draw conclusions from the performance in one task on the performance in the other task because an individual participant could show severe impairment in one task and perform relatively well in the other (ρ = 0.1; P = 0.73). We found that atrophy of distinct cerebellar areas correlated with impairment in different tasks. Whereas atrophy of the intermediate and lateral zone of the anterior lobe correlated with impairment in the FF task (ρ = 0.72, 0.70; P = 0.003, 0.005, respectively), atrophy of the intermediate zone of the posterior lobe correlated with adaptation deficits in the VM task (ρ = 0.64; P = 0.015). Our results suggest that adaptation to the different tasks is processed independently and relies on different cerebellar structures.

2012 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Opher Donchin ◽  
Kasja Rabe ◽  
Jörn Diedrichsen ◽  
Níall Lally ◽  
Beate Schoch ◽  
...  

Studies with patients and functional magnetic resonance imaging investigations have demonstrated that the cerebellum plays an essential role in adaptation to visuomotor rotation and force field perturbation. To identify cerebellar structures involved in the two tasks, we studied 19 patients with focal lesions after cerebellar infarction. Focal lesions were manually traced on magnetic resonance images and normalized using a new spatially unbiased template of the cerebellum. In addition, we reanalyzed data from 14 patients with cerebellar degeneration using voxel-based morphometry. We found that adjacent regions with only little overlap in the anterior arm area (lobules IV to VI) are important for adaptation in both tasks. Although adaptation to the force field task lay more anteriorly (lobules IV and V), lobule VI was more important for the visuomotor task. In addition, regions in the posterolateral cerebellum (Crus I and II) contributed to both tasks. No consistent involvement of the posterior arm region (lobule VIII) was found. Independence of the two kinds of adaptation is further supported by findings that performance in one task did not correlate to performance in the other task. Our results show that the anterior arm area of the cerebellum is functionally divided into a more posterior part of lobule VI, extending into lobule V, related to visuomotor adaption, and a more anterior part including lobules IV and V, related to force field adaption. The posterolateral cerebellum may process common aspects of both tasks.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
А. Г. БОДРОВА

The paper considers travelogues of Yugoslav female writers Alma Karlin, Jelena Dimitrijević, Isidora Sekulić, Marica Gregorič Stepančič, Marica Strnad, Luiza Pesjak. These texts created in the first half of the 20th century in Serbian, Slovenian and German are on the periphery of the literary field and, with rare exceptions, do not belong to the canon. The most famous of these authors are Sekulić from Serbia and the German-speaking writer Karlin from Slovenia. Recently, the work of Dimitrijević has also become an object of attention of researchers. Other travelogues writers are almost forgotten. Identity problems, especially national ones, are a constant component of the travelogue genre. During a journey, the author directs his attention to “other / alien” peoples and cultures that can be called foreign to the perceiving consciousness. However, when one perceives the “other”, one inevitably turns to one's “own”, one's own identity. The concept of “own - other / alien”, on which the dialogical philosophy is based (M. Buber, G. Marcel, M. Bakhtin, E. Levinas), implies an understanding of the cultural “own” against the background of the “alien” and at the same time culturally “alien” on the background of “own”. Women's travel has a special status in culture. Even in the first half of the 20th century the woman was given space at home. Going on a journey, especially unaccompanied, was at least unusual for a woman. According to Simone de Beauvoir, a woman in society is “different / other”. Therefore, women's travelogues can be defined as the look of the “other” on the “other / alien”. In this paper, particular attention is paid to the interrelationship of gender, national identities and their conditioning with a cultural and historical context. At the beginning of the 20th century in the Balkans, national identity continues actively to develop and the process of women's emancipation is intensifying. Therefore, the combination of gender and national issues for Yugoslavian female travelogues of this period is especially relevant. Dimitrijević's travelogue Seven Seas and Three Oceans demonstrates this relationship most vividly: “We Serbian women are no less patriotic than Egyptian women... Haven't Serbian women most of the merit that the big Yugoslavia originated from small Serbia?” As a result of this study, the specificity of the national and gender identity constructs in the first half of the 20th century in the analyzed texts is revealed. For this period one can note, on the one hand, the preservation of national and gender boundaries, often supported by stereotypes, on the other hand, there are obvious tendencies towards the erosion of the established gender and national constructs, the mobility of models of gender and national identification as well, largely due to the sociohistorical processes of the time.


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (01) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shlesha Singh ◽  
Mrinalini Pandey

Organizations are these days realizing the importance of women in the workforce and to tap that talent, organizations are now-a-days putting extra efforts. Workplaces were designed keeping men in mind and which has been intercepting women from continuing the competitive jobs and career along with the family responsibilities. On the other hand, there are various workplace barriers which are adding to the other problems. Women face several barriers at the workplace like sexual harassment, glass ceiling and gender stereotype.


Author(s):  
Dunja Apostolov-Dimitrijevic

This paper explains political democratization in Post-Milosevic Serbia, utilizing two different accounts of the democratization process: one rooted in the rational choice framework and the other in structuralism. While rational choice explains the decisive role of political leadership in overcoming path dependence, the structuralist explanations show the transnational linkages that encourage democratization in the face of domestic setbacks. This particular debate between the two types of explanations represents the larger debate concerning the role of internal factors and external linkages in propelling democratization in transitional societies. The paper concludes by integrating the two sets of explanations offered by each theoretical perspective, in order to develop a coherent understanding of Serbia's democratization.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v9i1.240


Author(s):  
Patrick Colm Hogan

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.


Author(s):  
Jane Caputi

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.


Author(s):  
Melissa Shani Brown ◽  
Nichola Lucy Partridge

AbstractIn this article we consider the representation of the character Cole in Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition (Electronic Arts, San Mateo, 2014), focusing upon how his asexuality is treated by other characters and its significance within his narrative arc. As well as contributing to the discussion of the representation of sexualities and gender within games, we seek to add to the ‘representational archive of asexuality’ (Cerankowski and Milks, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, Routledge, Abingdon, p 40, 2014), including games as media depicting and defining asexuality through fictional characterisation. We argue that it is particularly through humour that Cole is marked as being ambiguously set apart from the other characters in the game, and is infantilized as a ‘boy’ rather than a young man. Within a party of diverse genders, sexualities and indeed species, Cole’s absent interest in sex is treated as though it were something strange and in need of being overcome for Cole to become fully ‘human’. Beyond the scope of this game, this raises further questions for the representation of asexuality within media culture, and broader cultural discourses concerning whether asexuality is conceived of as being within the bounds of both masculinity and human normality.


2003 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Fernández ◽  
W. Herrera ◽  
T. Harmony ◽  
L Díaz-Comas ◽  
E. Santiago ◽  
...  

Neurofeedback (NFB) is an operant conditioning procedure, by which the subject learns to control his/her EEG activity. On one hand, Learning Disabled (LD) children have higher values of theta EEG absolute and relative power than normal children, and on the other hand, it has been shown that minimum alpha absolute power is necessary for adequate performance. Ten LD children were selected with higher than normal ratios of theta to alpha absolute power (theta/alpha). The Test Of Variables of Attention (TOVA) was applied. Children were divided into two groups in order to maintain similar IQ values, TOVA values, socioeconomical status, and gender for each group. In the experimental group, NFB was applied in the region with highest ratio, triggering a sound each time the ratio fell below a threshold value. Noncontingent reinforcement was given to the other group. Twenty half-hour sessions were applied, at a rate of 2 per week. At the end of the 20 sessions, TOVA, WISC and EEG were obtained. There was significant improvement in WISC performance in the experimental group that was not observed in the control group. EEG absolute power decreased in delta, theta, alpha and beta bands in the experimental group. Control children only showed a decrease in relative power in the delta band. All changes observed in the experimental group and not observed in the control group indicate better cognitive performance and the presence of greater EEG maturation in the experimental group, which suggests that changes were due not only to development but also to NFB treatment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (8) ◽  
pp. 983-993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Asif ◽  
Muhammad Aslam ◽  
Saima Altaf ◽  
Sajid Mustafa

AbstractObjectivesChildren from different countries and with different ethnic backgrounds have a distinct pattern of central fat deposition. Therefore, it is essential to develop population-specific percentiles of waist circumference (WC), waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) and waist-to-height ratio exponent (WHtR (exp)) for the evaluation of central obesity. The objective of this study was to develop age-and-gender-specific smoothed WC and WHtR percentile curves for the Pakistani children and adolescents aged 2–18 years.MethodsA cross-sectional data-set from a multi-ethnic anthropometric survey was considered. A sample of 10,668 healthy subjects (boys = 51.92%; and girls = 48.08%), aged 2–18 years was studied. Height (cm) and WC (cm) of each subject was measured under standard procedure and WHtR & WHtR (exp) were calculated. Age-and-gender-specific smoothed curves were obtained using the lambda-mu-sigma (LMS) method and compared with percentile curves obtained from different countries.ResultsExcept few early ages, the WC values increased with age in both sexes. Both boys and girls had approximately similar WC during 6–11 years of age and after age of 11, the boys had larger WC than the girls had. For WHtR, the centile curves showed a continuous decrease by 16 years of age and then increased gradually. WHtR of the girls in various ages were having similar or higher than those of the boys. In comparison of WC 50th and 90th percentiles with other countries, it was found that except few ages, the Pakistani children had larger WC than the other reference populations and the results of WHtR were also comparable to the other nations.ConclusionsWe present new reference data of WC, WHtR and WHtR (exp) using a representative sample of the Pakistani children aged 2–18 years. These reference values can be used provisionally for early detection of central obesity and its associated risks in the Pakistani children.


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