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PubMed2000

Specific amygdaloid nuclei are involved in suppression or propagation of epileptiform activity during transition stage between oral automatisms and generalized clonic seizures.

Kindling is a model of the neural plasticity that occurs following stimulation to the brain, which can result in epileptogenesis. The amygdala (Am), one of the most sensitive structures from which to induce electrical kindling, is comprised of distinct nuclei that possess differences in threshold for seizure initiation, unique cellular and molecular morphology, and specific neuroanatomical connections within the amygdala and, to other cortical and subcortical brain structures. The aim of this study was to map the spread of epileptiform activity throughout the ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres during the transition stage between oral automatisms and generalized clonic seizures, by measuring changes in mRNA expression for c-fos, NGFI-A, and BDNF. The stimulating electrode was implanted in either the basolateral (BL) or the lateral (CeL) or medial (CeM) subdivisions of the central nucleus of the amygdala. The rats were kindled once daily using afterdischarge-threshold electrical stimulation until the first forelimb clonic seizure was induced. They were sacrificed 30 min later, and their brains were prepared for in situ hybridization to measure mRNA expression of c-fos, NGFI-A and BDNF. The results demonstrate that: (1) the threshold to elicit an afterdischarge from the BL was lower than that of either the medial (CeM) or lateral (CeL) subdivisions of the Ce, which did not differ from each other; (2) the patterns of mRNA expression for c-fos, NGFI-A and BDNF were highly similar to each other when the stimulation site was the BL or the CeL, and included mainly limbic cortical and subcortical areas ipsilateral to the electrode; (3) c-fos was the only probe to be expressed in the contralateral hemisphere following the first motor seizure, and the pattern of its expression reflected a subset of structures recruited in the ipsilateral hemisphere including the claustrum, insular and perirhinal cortices; (4) unexpectedly, stimulation of the CeM elicited seizures and afterdischarges of shorter duration than those evoked by stimulation of the BL or CeL, and failed to increase mRNA expression for any of the probes in the hippocampus or in the contralateral hemisphere. A neuroanatomical model of Am-induced seizure propagation is proposed suggesting that the Claust-Ins-PRh play a pivotal role during the transition between oral automatisms and generalized clonic convulsions.

Amygdala↗
PubMed2006

[Automatic recall of didactic knowledge in semantic memory during normal aging and in Alzheimer's disease].

INTRODUCTION: The goal of our work is to study the most consolidated items of semantic memory in normal subjects and in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). PATIENTS AND METHOD: The first test is based on automatic recall of didactic knowledge. This test is made of 250 automatic verbal expressions exploring general knowledge. It as been validated according to age and cultural levels in 219 normal subjects (20-90 years old). Another simplified test called EVA including only 50 of the 250 previously chosen items was also used. The EVA scores found in a normal population have been classified by centilages according to age and cultural levels. The EVA was also tested in 20 patients with AD and the results compared with MMSE and "Pyramids and Palm Trees Test" (semantic memory testing). RESULTS: The results reveal that the scores observed with the first test in a normal population with comparable cultural levels are correlated with age. EVA test scores found in control subjects show that the median value, for a same age group, is positively correlated with cultural levels. In patients with AD, scores for EVA test and MMSE are associated, the low results being linked to the severity of dementia. In addition, scores for EVA test and "Pyramids and Palm Trees Test" are also significantly correlated. Seven patients with mild dementia (MMSE>20) have abnormal scores for the "Pyramids and Palm Trees Test". CONCLUSION: Our study confirms that changes linked to aging do not involve all aspects of cognition. The most consolidated items of semantic memory assessed by EVA test seem to resist at the beginning of AD but later decline similarly to the other items of semantic memory. Normal results for EVA tests do not imply that semantic memory is not affected in the early phases of AD. We propose this new test which assesses the semantic memory stock without involving an active process of recuperation. This test is not suitable for an early diagnosis of AD but could help to evaluate the severity of the disease during the evolution.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Highest level automatisms in the nervous system: a theory of functional principles underlying the highest forms of brain function.

A concept that all hierarchical levels of the nervous system are built according to the same functional principles is proposed. Each level is responsible for a discrete type or set of automatisms, is a learning system, and contains two distinct functional subdivisions: (1) a controller, a subsystem providing a governing set of rules or commands-a control law-that directs the action of the recipient of these rules-the controlled object; and (2) a model, a subsystem that generates a model of object behavior, i.e. afferent information flow expected from the controlled object. A control system such as this receives two types of afferent signals-initiating and informational. The difference between these signals is that a control system minimizes initiating signals during the realization of an automatism, i.e. a control neural network utilizes informational signals to compute the proper output that minimizes the initiating input signal. A mismatch or error signal, a type of initiating signal, is responsible for learning. Both the control law and the model can be adjusted during learning. The learning process starts when the error signal increases and stops when it is minimized. A network hierarchy is structurally and functionally organized in such a way that a lower control system in the nervous system becomes the controlled object for a higher one. This hierarchy leads to a generalization of encoded functional parameters and, consequently, the working space for each higher level control system becomes more abstracted. This is the reason why each hierarchical level within the control nervous system uses detectors specific for feature of the controlled object and the environment that match the control needs in order to obtain information about the current state of the object in the environment. Movement of information toward higher hierarchical levels also is accompanied by an increase in the duration of initiating signals within each control system. The ability to store a long prehistory of preceding events is considered as the mechanism that necessitated the invention of more complex and more rapid forms of learning such as operant learning, and made possible more complex multistep computational algorithms that require memorization of the results of previous intermediate computations. The functions of the cerebellum, the limbic system and the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical loops are analyzed to illustrate the utility and applicability of this theoretical concept. Basal ganglia-thalamocortical loops are described as modeling, predictive loops, and their dopaminergic innervation as an error distribution system.

Automatism↗
PubMed2005

Automatic processing of dominance and submissiveness.

We investigated whether people are able to detect in a relatively automatic manner the dominant or submissive status of persons engaged in social interactions. We used a nonaffective variant of the affective Simon paradigm of De Houwer and Eelen (1998) in which participants responded by saying either "dominant" or "submissive" depending on the right or left spatial position of a target person who was engaged as either the dominant or the submissive agent in a social interaction. We observed that responses were facilitated when the status connotation of the target person and the correct response corresponded. These results provide new information about the automatic nature of information related to emotion-antecedent appraisals.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1996

Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action.

Previous research has shown that trait concepts and stereotype become active automatically in the presence of relevant behavior or stereotyped-group features. Through the use of the same priming procedures as in previous impression formation research, Experiment 1 showed that participants whose concept of rudeness was printed interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than did participants primed with polite-related stimuli. In Experiment 2, participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than did control participants, consistent with the content of that stereotype. In Experiment 3, participants for whom the African American stereotype was primed subliminally reacted with more hostility to a vexatious request of the experimenter. Implications of this automatic behavior priming effect for self-fulfilling prophecies are discussed, as is whether social behavior is necessarily mediated by conscious choice processes.

Affect↗
PubMed1994

Conditional and unconditional automaticity: a dual-process model of effects of spatial stimulus-response correspondence.

Distributional analyses and event-related brain potential were used to show that effects of irrelevant spatial stimulus-response correspondence consist of 2 qualitatively different automatic components that can be distinguished on the basis of their dependencies on relative response speed and on computational requirements of the primary task. One component reflects priming of the spatially corresponding response by an abrupt stimulus onset that does not depend on the nature of the primary task. This unconditional component exhibits a biphasic pattern, with initial facilitation later turning into inhibition, analogous to that found for spatial cuing in visual detection tasks. The 2nd component reflects automatic generalization of task-defined transformations of relevant stimulus information to spatial codes; this conditional component does not depend on relative response speed. Possible connectionist implementations of the conditional mechanism are discussed.

Automatism↗
PubMed1998

Invariance in automatic influences of memory: toward a user's guide for the process-dissociation procedure.

Three experiments investigated assumptions of the process-dissociation procedure for separating consciously controlled and automatic influences of memory. Conditions that encouraged direct retrieval revealed process dissociations. Manipulating attention during study or manipulating study time affected recollection but left automatic influences of memory relatively invariant. However, paradoxical dissociations were found when conditions encouraged use of a generate-recognize strategy, violating assumptions underlying the estimation procedure. Use of subjective reports to gain estimates produced parallel results. Easily observed correlations are shown to be not useful for testing assumptions underlying the process-dissociation procedure. A multinomial model produced results that agree with those from the process-dissociation approach.

Automatism↗
PubMed2000

Instance-based automaticity and aging: acquisition, reacquisition, and long-term retention.

This research examined age differences in the acquisition and reacquisition of instance-based automaticity. In 2 experiments, young and older adults were trained to enumerate targets presented in otherwise empty displays or in displays that contained distractors. Experiment 1 revealed that older adults required more practice to reach asymptote than young adults. For both age groups, modifications of the identities and locations of targets produced substantial disruptions in performance, whereas modifications of the identities or locations of distractors produced little interference. However, no age differences in the representations of instances in memory were obtained in participants who reached asymptote. Experiment 2 revealed age deficits in the long-term retention and rate of reacquisition of instance-based automaticity 18 months after initial training.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Automatic negative evaluation of suffocation sensations in individuals with suffocation fear.

The current study tested whether "suffocation sensations" (respiratory loads) are automatically evaluated in a negative way by people fearing these sensations. It was found that, after having been primed with a slight respiratory load, participants with high suffocation fear (n=15) reacted more quickly to suffocation words and more slowly to positive words than participants with low suffocation fear (n=21). However, the effect was present only in participants who had noticed the primes. The findings are relevant to the cognitive model of panic disorder because automatic negative appraisal of sensations may play a role in initiating a panic attack.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Automatic and controlled components of judgment and decision making.

The categorization of inductive reasoning into largely automatic processes (heuristic reasoning) and controlled analytical processes (rule-based reasoning) put forward by dual-process approaches of judgment under uncertainty (e.g., K. E. Stanovich & R. F. West, 2000) has been primarily a matter of assumption with a scarcity of direct empirical findings supporting it. The present authors use the process dissociation procedure (L. L. Jacoby, 1991) to provide convergent evidence validating a dual-process perspective to judgment under uncertainty based on the independent contributions of heuristic and rule-based reasoning. Process dissociations based on experimental manipulation of variables were derived from the most relevant theoretical properties typically used to contrast the two forms of reasoning. These include processing goals (Experiment 1), cognitive resources (Experiment 2), priming (Experiment 3), and formal training (Experiment 4); the results consistently support the author's perspective. They conclude that judgment under uncertainty is neither an automatic nor a controlled process but that it reflects both processes, with each making independent contributions.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2006

Visual word recognition without central attention: evidence for greater automaticity with advancing age.

The present experiments examined the automaticity of word recognition. The authors examined whether people can recognize words while central attention is devoted to another task and how this ability changes across the life span. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision Task 2 was combined with either an auditory or a visual Task 1. Regardless of the Task 1 modality, Task 2 word recognition proceeded in parallel with Task 1 central operations for older adults but not for younger adults. This is a rare example of improved cognitive processing with advancing age. When Task 2 was nonlexical (Experiment 2), however, there was no evidence for greater parallel processing for older adults. Thus, the processing advantage appears to be restricted to lexical processes. The authors conclude that greater cumulative experience with lexical processing leads to greater automaticity, allowing older adults to more efficiently perform this stage in parallel with another task.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Ictal automatisms with preserved responsiveness in a patient with left mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

PURPOSE: To describe the possible mechanism of ictal automatisms with preserved responsiveness (APRs) in a patient with left mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, which had not been reported previously. METHODS: Ictal EEGs recorded from bilateral foramen ovale electrodes with scalp-sphenoidal electrodes were analyzed in respect to the ictal semiology. RESULTS: The patient had a right hemispheric language dominance in the dextral. Electroclinical analysis revealed that the onset of oroalimentary automatisms coincided with the involvement of the left mesial and lateral temporal structures by spreading ictal discharges. The ictal discharge spreading was limited to the ipsilateral hemisphere throughout the seizure, which explained the intact consciousness and preserved responsiveness of the patient. CONCLUSIONS: This case suggests that APRs take place in seizures originating from the nondominant temporal lobe, during which ipsilateral mesial and lateral temporal structures are diffusely involved without spreading to the contralateral side.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Automaticity and hypnosis: a sociocognitive account.

This article provides an overview of a new theory of suggested involuntariness in hypnosis, developed in conjunction with Irving Kirsch. The theory is based on the following ideas. First, high hypnotizable participants enter hypnosis with a conscious intention to feel and behave in line with suggested experiences and movements. Second, people who are easily hypnotized hold firm expectations that they will succeed in following the suggestions of the hypnotist. Third, the intention and expectation in turn function as response sets in the sense that they trigger the hypnotic response automatically. Fourth, given the intention to feel and behave in line with the hypnotist's suggestions, hypnotized individuals show no hesitation to experience the suggested movements as involuntary because (a) these movements are actually triggered automatically, and (b) the intention to cooperate with the hypnotist as well as the expectation to be able to do so create a heightened readiness to experience these actions as involuntary.

Automatism↗
PubMed2003

Acquisition and automatization of a complex task: an examination of three-ball cascade juggling.

The learning patterns of 3-ball cascade juggling from acquisition until automaticity were examined in 10 participants. On the basis of outcome measures derived from 26 practice sessions and 4 periodic probe sessions, the authors differentiated participants into 3 distinct learning types: a proficient group, an emerging group, and a single late learner. The proficient group was distinguished by how rapidly they learned and automatized performance. Most interesting, an inverse response cost (i.e., performance boost) on the secondary task was found in the majority of proficient group members during the dual-task condition. The present results are discussed in relation to the P. L. Ackerman model (1987, 1988) of complex skill acquisition as is the significance of the inverse response cost finding.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

Habit lag: when "automatization" is dysfunctional.

La Fave's habit lag construct, which specifies conditions under which previously automatized motor responses become disruptive of subsequent performance, was tested. Performance under stress was also examined as a possible factor in the occurrence of habit lag. Following a visual discrimination task, 48 women performed motor responses simultaneously: (a) repeating an invariant lever movement and (b) pushing one of two keys. The habit lag construct was supported, as Ss who had automatized responses produced more errors than nonautomatized Ss. Performance under stress, by calling attention to the risk of habit lag, reduced errors. Habit lag accounts for an intrusive type of error often found in motor performance where negative transfer fails to do so.

Achievement↗
PubMed2006

Cerebral automatism, the brain, and the soul in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries. Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was "determined" through the reflex action of the body and brain-a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker's vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.

Automatism↗
PubMed2006

Strategic and automatic threat processing in chronic musculoskeletal pain: a startle probe investigation.

Attentional bias research with chronic pain samples has yielded conflicting results. In the present investigation the startle paradigm was used to test the postulate that fear-based mechanisms play an important role in attentional biases for pain-related threat in chronic pain. Participants, including 31 individuals with chronic musculoskeletal pain and 20 healthy controls, completed a startle task designed to measure attention to different types of words (neutral vs sensory pain vs affective pain vs health catastrophe) presented at different levels of cognitive processing (strategic vs automatic). Measures of fear-based individual difference variables, including anxiety sensitivity and fear of pain, were also completed. Startle amplitudes and latencies to acoustic startle probes that followed word presentations were recorded. Data were analyzed with repeated measures ANOVAs and correlational analysis. Significant between-group differences were found indicating that, relative to chronic pain participants, healthy controls had higher startle amplitude index scores for health catastrophe words. There was also a trend among patients with chronic pain for greater startle amplitude index scores for strategic presentations of sensory pain words. In the automatic condition, all participants demonstrated a lower startle latency index for sensory words relative to both affect and health catastrophe words, suggesting participants had more difficulty disengaging from affect and health catastrophe words or were more avoidant of sensory words. Correlational analyses indicated that startle response indices for words related to health catastrophe became more pronounced for chronic pain patients as anxiety sensitivity and fear of pain increased. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1998

Automatic spatial updating during locomotion without vision.

People can update their spatial relationships relative to the environment while walking without vision. The hypothesis that such updating is automatic was tested in a locomotor task in which the subjects were asked to refrain from updating their positions. Subjects walked without vision to one of four previously seen targets via a second location. In one condition--the updating condition--the subjects were asked to walk to the real position of the target relative to the second location; in another--the ignoring condition--they were asked to imagine that they had not moved from the starting point and to walk from the second location as if walking to the target from the initial location. When the subjects were asked to start walking to the target as soon as it was named by the experimenter, they performed better in the updating condition than in the ignoring condition. When the subjects were allowed more time to respond, the difference in performance between these two conditions disappeared. The results suggest that the subjects automatically updated their positions as they moved, but that, given enough time, they could override this updating retrospectively using more deliberate cognitive processing.

Automatism↗