Expertly collected, well-curated data sets consisting of comprehensive clinical characterization and raw structural, functional and diffusion-weighted DICOM images in schizophrenia patients and sex and age-matched controls are now accessible to the scientific community through an on-line data repository (coins.mrn.org).
The Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) initiative, funded by an R13 from the National Institute of Mental Health, seeks to enhance translational research in treatment development for impaired cognition in schizophrenia by developing tools from cognitive neuroscience into useful measures of treatment effects on behavior and brain function. An initial series of meetings focused on the selection of a new set of tasks from cognitive neuroscience for the measurement of treatment effects on specific cognitive and neural systems.
BACKGROUND: In this study we explored if laboratory-based cocaine administration to human subjects was associated with long-term adverse outcomes.
METHODS: Twenty-one non--reatment seeking individuals with cocaine dependence were evaluated at baseline and again 5 and 10 months following cocaine infusion in a brain imaging study. Outcomes included computer-driven multidimensional clinical assessments and radioimmunoassay of hair. For comparison, identical data were collected from 19 cocaine-dependent subjects who did not receive the infusion.
OBJECTIVE: The authors sought to better understand the neural circuitry associated with working memory deficits in psychotic major depression by examining brain function during an N-back task.
METHOD: Study subjects were 16 patients with psychotic major depression, 15 patients with nonpsychotic major depression, and 19 healthy comparison subjects. Functional MRI data were collected while participants responded to letter stimuli that were repeated from the previous trial (1-back) or the one before that (2-back).
OBJECTIVE: The limbic system is thought to underlie dysfunctional affective and cognitive processes in individuals with depression. Neuroanatomical studies of subjects with depression have often examined hippocampal and amygdalar structures, since they are two key structures of the limbic system. Research has often but not always found reduced hippocampal volume in patients with major depression. The purpose of the present study was to examine differences in hippocampal and amygdalar volumes in patients with depression subtypes relative to healthy comparison subjects.
Psychotic major depression (PMD) is associated with deficits in verbal memory as well as other cognitive impairments. This study investigated brain function in individuals with PMD during a verbal declarative memory task. Participants included 16 subjects with PMD, 15 subjects with non-psychotic major depression (NPMD) and 16 healthy controls (HC). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired while subjects performed verbal memory encoding and retrieval tasks.
Recent data suggests that psychotic major depression (PMD) may be a discrete disorder distinguishable from nonpsychotic major depression (NPMD), and that patients with PMD may be more similar to individuals with schizophrenia than individuals with NPMD. The insula is a brain region in which morphometric changes have been associated with psychotic symptom severity in schizophrenia and affective psychosis. It was hypothesized that insular volumes would be reduced in PMD compared to NPMD and controls, and insular volumes would correlate with psychosis but not depression severity.
Many sorts of deficits in imagery follow brain damage, but the relation between the site of damage and the type of deficit is not simple or straightforward. The dissociations in performance after brain damage provide hints regarding the processing system underlying imagery, but difficulties in interpretation urge caution in mapping these findings to theoretic models.
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study practice effects in different mental imagery tasks. The study was designed to address three general questions: First, are the results of standard group-based analyses the same as those of a regression method in which brain activation changes over individual participants are used to predict task performance changes? With respect to the effects of practice, the answer was clear: Group-based analyses produced different results from regression-based individual-differences analyses.
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the maximal degree of shared neural processing in visual mental imagery and visual perception. Participants either visualized or saw faint drawings of simple objects, and then judged specific aspects of the drawings (which could only be evaluated properly if they used the correct stimulus). The results document that visual imagery and visual perception draw on most of the same neural machinery.
