The cerebellum and embodied semantics: evidence from a case of genetic ataxia due toSTUB1mutations

Action‐semantic and syntactic deficits in subjects at risk for Huntington's disease

“…As the latter are less concrete and imaginable than the former (e.g., Dalla Volta, Fabbri‐Destro, Gentilucci, & Avanzini, ; García & Ibáñez, ), they are harder to process even when matched for other relevant variables. Despite such differences, patients with motor disorders evince selective action‐verb deficits even when processing of the even more demanding abstract‐verb category is spared, as observed in PD (Fernandino et al ., ) and genetic ataxia with preserved MoCA performance (García, Abrevaya, et al ., ). In line with this evidence, the selective action‐semantic impairment in HDRels is probably reflects the specific relation between motor networks and action semantics, rather than non‐specific, demand‐related effects.…”

“…Although asymptomatic relatives constitute a well‐established vulnerability group at risk for HD, even in the absence of confirmed genetic alterations (Baez et al ., , ; Dorsey, ; Giordani et al ., ; Kargieman et al ., ; Markianos et al ., ; Panegyres & Goh, ), it would be most informative to replicate our study in combination with exome sequencing or other forms of genetic assessment – for an example, see García, Abrevaya, et al . (). Also, we were unable to collect neuroimaging data to corroborate the hypothesized roles of specific frontostriatal hubs to different subdomains.…”

“…However, syntactic and action‐semantic tasks may be even more sensitive to such an end. Evidence from other motor disorders, such as PD (Bocanegra et al ., ) and genetic ataxia (García, Abrevaya, et al ., ) shows that both domains can become compromised even when MoCA scores are normal. Moreover, HDRels may feature high‐order difficulties even in the absence of MoCA deficits (e.g., Baez et al ., ), whereas mutation carriers at risk for other frontostriatal motor conditions have been observed to feature syntactic deficits even when performance in domain‐general batteries is spared (García et al ., ).…”

“…Second, individual subjects confirmed to be gene carriers and non-carriers should perform those tasks and their performance should be compared to that of healthy control samples, on the assumption that only the former should evince the deficits documented herein. The necessary analysis could be performed, for example, through Crawford's modified two-tailed t-test (Crawford & Garthwaite, 2002, 2012Crawford, Garthwaite, & Howell, 2009;Crawford, Garthwaite, & Ryan, 2011;Crawford & Howell, 1998), which proves robust for non-normal distributions, presents low rates of type-I error, and has been successfully used in previous single-case studies (Couto et al, 2013(Couto et al, , 2014Garc ıa, Sedeño, Herrera Murcia, Couto, & Ib añez, 2017;Garc ıa, Abrevaya, et al, 2017;Straube et al, 2010). The evidence thus obtained would be critical to test the usefulness of the proposed domains to detect pre-clinical deficits at the singlesubject level.…”

Multilevel convergence of interoceptive impairments in hypertension: New evidence of disrupted body–brain interactions

“…For this analysis, we restricted the analysis to the key interoceptive areas (bilateral anterior and posterior insula, ACC, and somatosensory cortex) by applying a binary mask. As reported in previous works (Garcia et al, ; García‐Cordero et al, ; Irish et al, ), we applied a spatial threshold of 50 voxels, and an uncorrected statistical threshold of p values smaller than .001.…”