In recent years we have witnessed an increasing interest in food processing and eating behaviors. This is probably due to several reasons. The biological relevance of food choices, the complexity of the food-rich environment in which we presently live (making food-intake regulation difficult), and the increasing health care cost due to illness associated with food (food hazards, food contamination, and aberrant food-intake). Despite the importance of the issues and the relevance of this research, comprehensive and validated databases of stimuli are rather limited, outdated, or not available for non-commercial purposes to independent researchers who aim at developing their own research program. The FoodCast Research Image Database (FRIDa) we present here includes 877 images belonging to eight different categories: natural-food (e.g., strawberry), transformed-food (e.g., french fries), rotten-food (e.g., moldy banana), natural-non-food items (e.g., pinecone), artificial food-related objects (e.g., teacup), artificial objects (e.g., guitar), animals (e.g., camel), and scenes (e.g., airport). FRIDa has been validated on a sample of healthy participants (N = 73) on standard variables (e.g., valence, familiarity, etc.) as well as on other variables specifically related to food items (e.g., perceived calorie content); it also includes data on the visual features of the stimuli (e.g., brightness, high frequency power, etc.). FRIDa is a well-controlled, flexible, validated, and freely available (http://foodcast.sissa.it/neuroscience/) tool for researchers in a wide range of academic fields and industry.

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Although studies report age-related declines on tests of executive function, not all executive tests show age differences, including the dual-task paradigm. As processing speed is known to decline with age, it is possible that changes in speed contribute to the variation in agerelated decline found on different tests of executive function. In this study, the effects of age and processing speed on different executive tests in the same group of younger and older adults were investigated. Fifty-nine (n = 28 males & n = 31 females) younger adults (Mage = 21.49; SD = 2.54) and N = 52 (n = 22 males & n = 30 females) older adults (Mage = 72.04; SD = 4.99) were assessed on the following battery of measures: processing speed and the executive functions of dual-tasking, inhibition, set-shifting, and updating. Older adults performed significantly worse than younger adults on all executive function tests except dual-tasking. In addition, age, rather than processing speed, predicted executive function performance on executive tests of inhibition, set-shifting and updating tests. These findings confirm that dual-tasking does not decline with age and the age differences found on tests of inhibition, set-shifting and updating are not simply explained by processing speed.

There is ongoing debate regarding the role that sensorimotor regions play in conceptual processing, with embodied theories supporting their direct involvement in processing verbs describing body part movements. patient lesion studies examining a causal role for sensorimotor activation in conceptual task performance have suffered the caveat of lesions being largely diffuse and extensive beyond sensorimotor cortices. The current study addresses this limitation in reporting on 20 preoperative neurosurgical patients with focal lesion to the pre-and post-central area corresponding to somatotopic representations. patients were presented with a battery of neuropsychological tests and experimental tasks tapping into motor imagery and verbal conceptual verb processing in addition to neurophysiological measures including DTI, fMRI, and MEP being measured. Results indicated that left tumor patients who presented with a lesion at or near somatotopic hand representations performed significantly worse on the mental rotation hand task and that performance correlated with MEP amplitudes in the upper limb motor region. Furthermore, performance on tasks of verbal processing was within the normal range. Taken together, while our results evidence the involvement of the motor system in motor imagery processes, they do not support the embodied view that sensorimotor regions are necessary to tasks of action verb processing.www.nature.com/scientificreports www.nature.com/scientificreports/ Lesion localization. Contrast-enhanced T1-and T2-weighted MRI scans were performed 7-10 days prior to surgery in order to determine the preoperative tumor location. DTI and anatomical and functional images were acquired from both patients and healthy controls using a Philips Achieva 3-T (Best, Netherlands) scanner. A SENSE-Head-8 channel head coil and a custom-built head restrainer were used to minimize head movements. Scientific RepoRtS |(2020) 10:523 | https://doi.

The aging process is characterized by change across several measures that index cognitive status and brain integrity. In the present study, 54 cognitively-healthy younger and older adults, were analyzed, longitudinally, on a verbal working memory task to investigate the effect of brain maintenance (i.e., cortical thickness) and cognitive reserve (i.e., NART IQ as proxy) factors on a derived measure of neural efficiency. Participants were scanned using fMRI while presented with the Letter Sternberg task at different levels of cognitive load. Via correlation analysis, we looked at region-level and whole-brain relationships between load levels within each phase and then computed a global task measure, what we term phase specificity, to analyze how similar neural responses were across load levels within each phase compared to between each phase. We found that longitudinal change in phase specificity was positively related to longitudinal change in cortical thickness, at both the whole-brain and regional level, with baseline NART IQ being positively related to change in phase specificity over time. Furthermore, we found a longitudinal effect of sex on change in phase specificity, such that females displayed higher phase specificity over time. Cross-sectional findings aligned with longitudinal findings, with the notable addition of behavioral performance being positively linked to phase specificity cross-sectionally at baseline. Taken together, our findings suggest that phase specificity positively relates to maintenance and reserve factors and should be better investigated as a measure of neural efficiency.