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Results for “Human cognition”

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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1979

H. S. Sullivan and the phenomenology of human cognition.

It is the purpose of this article to offer additional clarification of H. S. Sullivan's three-way division of cognitive experience. The investigation involves an analysis of C. S. Peirce's phenomenological categories of experience and their three Sullivanian parallels, i.e., prototaxis, parataxis, and syntaxis. It will be argued that the utilisation of these categories will provide psychiatrists with the following:(1) a set of non-psychiatric criteria for clarifying the underlying principles of psychiatric claims, (2) a broader base for analysing the nature of interpersonal relations, and (3) an additional means of preserving the self-correcting character of inter-personal psychiatry as a theory.

Cognition↗
PubMed1979

Induction/catastrophe theory: a behavioral ecological approach to cognition in human individuals.

Gibson's (1966) ecological formulation of perceptual processes as abstracted systems, the tenets and units of neobehaviorism as formulated within psychobiology and the experimental analysis of behavior, and the topological approaches of mathematical biology as formulated by Rashevsky (1951, 1960) and Thom (1975) are the elemental concepts that form the basis of the theory presented in this paper. A cognitive or decision process of individual human beings--living systems at the organism level--emerges as a one-step, match-contrast, serial pattern embedded as a triplet of Gibson frames in five-dimensional butterfly catastrophe. Some of the experimental, clinical and philosophical implications of a "catastrophic" formulation of induction are discussed.

Behaviorism↗
PubMed1977

Ethanol and delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol interactive effects on human perceptual, cognitive and motor functions. II.

Fifteen paid student volunteers (10 male, five female) were used in a double-blind crossover experiment to further investigated the effects of delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), alone and in combination with ethanol, on perceptual, cognitive and motor functions. Both ethanol (0-54 g/kg) and THC (15 MG/70 KG) WERE GIVEN ORALLY. Ethanol was not very effective in in+uencing performance but this dose of THC produced marked decrements, predominantly in the latter part of the experiment. When they were given together, an early additive effect was apparent, but later, there was a suggestion of antagonism in that subjects who received the drug combination performed better than those who were given THC along. The interaction between THC and ethanol was considered to be complex.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2019

Histone H3 lysine K4 methylation and its role in learning and memory.

Epigenetic modifications such as histone methylation permit change in chromatin structure without accompanying change in the underlying genomic sequence. A number of studies in animal models have shown that dysregulation of various components of the epigenetic machinery causes cognitive deficits at the behavioral level, suggesting that proper epigenetic control is necessary for the fundamental processes of learning and memory. Histone H3 lysine K4 (H3K4) methylation comprises one component of such epigenetic control, and global levels of this mark are increased in the hippocampus during memory formation. Modifiers of H3K4 methylation are needed for memory formation, shown through animal studies, and many of the same modifiers are mutated in human cognitive diseases. Indeed, all of the known H3K4 methyltransferases and four of the known six H3K4 demethylases have been associated with impaired cognition in a neurologic or psychiatric disorder. Cognitive impairment in such patients often manifests as intellectual disability, consistent with a role for H3K4 methylation in learning and memory. As a modification quintessentially, but not exclusively, associated with transcriptional activity, H3K4 methylation provides unique insights into the regulatory complexity of writing, reading, and erasing chromatin marks within an activated neuron. The following review will discuss H3K4 methylation and connect it to transcriptional events required for learning and memory within the developed nervous system. This will include an initial discussion of the most recent advances in the developing methodology to analyze H3K4 methylation, namely mass spectrometry and deep sequencing, as well as how these methods can be applied to more deeply understand the biology of this mark in the brain. We will then introduce the core enzymatic machinery mediating addition and removal of H3K4 methylation marks and the resulting epigenetic signatures of these marks throughout the neuronal genome. We next foray into the brain, discussing changes in H3K4 methylation marks within the hippocampus during memory formation and retrieval, as well as the behavioral correlates of H3K4 methyltransferase deficiency in this region. Finally, we discuss the human cognitive diseases connected to each H3K4 methylation modulator and summarize advances in developing drugs to target them.

Animals↗
PubMed2026

Brain-wide spontaneous neural avalanches: Definition, functional dynamics and cognitive relevance.

Although spontaneous activity is ubiquitous across multiple spatiotemporal scales, its functional organization and cognitive relevance remain poorly understood. Following the classic neuronal avalanche framework, a spontaneous avalanche is defined as consecutively active frames separated by inactive time bins. Hence, multiple distinct avalanches may be considered as one avalanche, thereby ignoring their spatial and temporal distinguishability. Furthermore, group-level power-law fitting of such neural avalanches is often performed to evaluate brain criticality (referring to a system perched between order and disorder) due to the limited recording length of macroscale neuroimaging (such as functional magnetic resonance imaging), and the functional representation of brain-wide neural avalanches is largely unexplored. To address these issues, we proposed large-scale neural avalanches as a single, spatially consecutive cascade pattern and further investigated their functional dynamics, network propagation, and association with task-evoked activity. Compared with the conventional inactive-bin definition, our current approach is more favorable to power-law fitting of avalanche size and duration distributions at the individual level. We also demonstrated that participants whose brain activities were close to the critical point tend to have higher cognitive abilities. Notably, the ratio of neural avalanches that evolved from primary sensory to association networks negatively correlated with cognitive abilities. Moreover, the geometric distance between low-dimensional representations of task-evoked activity and spontaneous avalanches was associated with behavioral performance. This study not only provides a promising avenue for measuring avalanche criticality based on human whole-brain neuroimaging, but also suggests that spontaneous neural avalanches and their low-dimensional representations contribute to human cognitive abilities.

Humans↗
PubMed2025

Exploring the transmission of cognitive task information through optimal brain pathways.

Understanding the large-scale information processing that underlies complex human cognition is the central goal of cognitive neuroscience. While emerging activity flow models demonstrate that cognitive task information is transferred by interregional functional or structural connectivity, graph-theory-based models typically assume that neural communication occurs via the shortest path of brain networks. However, whether the shortest path is the optimal route for empirical cognitive information transmission remains unclear. Based on a large-scale activity flow mapping framework, we found that the performance of activity flow prediction with the shortest path was significantly lower than that with the direct path. The shortest path routing was superior to other network communication strategies, including search information, path ensembles, and navigation. Intriguingly, the shortest path outperformed the direct path in activity flow prediction when the physical distance constraint and asymmetric routing contribution were simultaneously considered. This study not only challenges the shortest path assumption through empirical network models but also suggests that cognitive task information routing is constrained by the spatial and functional embedding of the brain network.

Humans↗
PubMed1978

General problems in medical decision making with comments on ROC analysis.

Medical decision-making studies continue to focus on two questions: How do physicians make decisions? How should physicians make decisions? Researchers pursuing the first question emphasize human cognitive processes and the programming of symbol systems to model observed human behavior. Those researchers concentrating on the second question assume that there is a standard of performance against which the physician's decisions can be judged, and to help the physician improve his performance, an array of tools is proposed. These tools include decision trees, Bayesian analysis, decision matrices, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis, and cost-benefit considerations including utility measures. Medical decision-making questions must be answered in an ethical context where ethics and decision analysis are interviewed.

Bayes Theorem↗
PubMed1977

[The human head, a cognitive and communicative system. Practical applications].

The human face is a sensory complex with the task of transmitting to the central nervous system most of the information and signals from the surroundings. This perceptive centripetal activity is linked with continual centrifugal transmissions to the surroundings of a relational type. The cerebral extremity of a human being is ethological in essence. The human cephalic phenotype is, during the whole of its development, a succession of responses of the genome to the stresses of the environment: it is an open system. The phylogenesis of the cerebral cognitive organs and the phylogenesis of the skeleton which protects them are linked. The growth of the membranous cephalic skeleton is under the control of these cognitive organs. Practical applications are deduced from this in connection with the pre-operative functional test for prognathisms.

Animals↗
PubMed2026

A systematic review of human avoidance learning: Cognition, computation, and methods.

Avoidance behaviour is fundamental for survival but can become maladaptive in clinical conditions. A large body of literature has accumulated on the dynamics of human avoidance learning. However, current theories and overviews do not provide an exhaustive account of this evidence. In this systematic review, we identify N = 116 studies on human avoidance learning. We analyse these studies with the goal of distilling robust empirical phenomena as a basis for theory-building, and examine their diagnostic value in differentiating between competing theories. We find that the evidence is difficult to reconcile with foundational two-factor and classical safety-signal accounts, and most strongly supports expectancy- and inference-based views, in which avoidance responses are selected with respect to represented consequences. At the same time, no current framework provides a complete account of the evidence: several findings point to an additional role for operant valuation, Pavlovian influences, and contextual or latent-state control over the expression of avoidance. Methodologically, we observe that the problem setting in the most common experimental paradigms is radically simpler than real-world avoidance and therefore unlikely to expose the limits of inferential or reflective mechanisms. Consequently, we argue that paradigms with greater computational demands and more realistic action affordances are required to identify the mechanisms underlying avoidance learning. Collectively, these insights provide a foundation for theoretical refinement, computational modelling, and methodological innovation, with implications for advancing interventions targeting maladaptive avoidance.

Humans↗
PubMed2021

1q21.1 distal copy number variants are associated with cerebral and cognitive alterations in humans.

Low-frequency 1q21.1 distal deletion and duplication copy number variant (CNV) carriers are predisposed to multiple neurodevelopmental disorders, including schizophrenia, autism and intellectual disability. Human carriers display a high prevalence of micro- and macrocephaly in deletion and duplication carriers, respectively. The underlying brain structural diversity remains largely unknown. We systematically called CNVs in 38 cohorts from the large-scale ENIGMA-CNV collaboration and the UK Biobank and identified 28 1q21.1 distal deletion and 22 duplication carriers and 37,088 non-carriers (48% male) derived from 15 distinct magnetic resonance imaging scanner sites. With standardized methods, we compared subcortical and cortical brain measures (all) and cognitive performance (UK Biobank only) between carrier groups also testing for mediation of brain structure on cognition. We identified positive dosage effects of copy number on intracranial volume (ICV) and total cortical surface area, with the largest effects in frontal and cingulate cortices, and negative dosage effects on caudate and hippocampal volumes. The carriers displayed distinct cognitive deficit profiles in cognitive tasks from the UK Biobank with intermediate decreases in duplication carriers and somewhat larger in deletion carriers-the latter potentially mediated by ICV or cortical surface area. These results shed light on pathobiological mechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders, by demonstrating gene dose effect on specific brain structures and effect on cognitive function.

Brain↗
PubMed2026

Genetic Association of the Transcriptome and Immunoglobulin G N-glycome with Cognitive Function.

OBJECTIVE: Immunoglobulin G (IgG) N-glycosylation is associated with mild cognitive impairment through the regulation of inflammatory balance; however, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. METHODS: Our study utilized a post-genome-wide association studies (GWAS) method that integrated GWAS data for cognitive function with gene expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL), protein QTL (pQTL), and IgG N-glycan-QTL data. RESULTS: Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses suggested bidirectional causalities between glycan peaks (GPs) and cognitive function, with GP7, GP12, and GP19 showing a causal effect on cognitive function, while cognitive function conversely showed a causal effect on GP1 and GP8. Two proteins and 10 genes were implicated in the regulation of IgG N-glycosylation. Furthermore, multivariable MR results suggested complex causalities between genes/proteins and IgG N-glycans, which jointly promote or independently affect cognitive function. CONCLUSION: Our study reveals a novel mechanism by which genes, proteins, and modified IgG N-glycans converge to pathologically affect cognitive function.

Immunoglobulin G↗
PubMed2026

Individualised mapping of living human brain mitochondria by MRI reveals signatures of bioenergetic defects.

Mitochondria support the bioenergetic processes that enable brain function and cognition, but we have lacked a label-free, non-invasive approach to explore how brain mitochondria are linked to ageing, disease, and cognition in humans. A recently introduced MitoBrainMap neuroimaging framework predicts mitochondrial features from magnetic resonance data alone, potentially bridging cellular biology with macroscale brain organization. Here, we tested whether this framework captures meaningful age- and pathology-related mitochondrial variation. Consistent with existing literature, we find that MR-predicted mitochondrial density and tissue respiratory capacity consistently declined with age, whereas mitochondrial respiratory capacity-an index of mitochondrial quality-was relatively preserved across the lifespan. Moreover, the relations among specific mitochondrial features predicted from our algorithm were consistent with their biological organization, supporting preliminary construct validity for MR-predicted mitochondrial features. In patients with rare mitochondrial diseases, predicted maps revealed region-specific alterations in mitochondrial density and respiratory chain components, particularly the expected compensatory upregulation of complex II, but not of other mitochondrial genome-encoded components. Finally, the MR-based mitochondrial features were associated with the energetic stress marker GDF15 measured in blood, as well as with cognitive performance measures, linking the novel predictions of brain mitochondria to systemic stress and behavior. These findings introduce a first-generation, label-free, neuroimaging-based mitochondrial mapping as a non-invasive window into living human brain mitochondria.

Journal Article↗