Habitual daily intake of a sweet and fatty snack modulates reward processing in humans

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Whole-brain mapping of effective connectivity by fMRI with cortex-wide patterned optogenetics

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Neural and social correlates of attitudinal brokerage: using the complete social networks of two entire villages

To avoid polarization and maintain small-worldness in society, people who act as attitudinal brokers are critical. These people maintain social ties with people who have dissimilar and even incompatible attitudes. Based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 139) and the complete social networks from two Korean villages (n = 1508), we investigated the individual-level neural capacity and social-level structural opportunity for attitudinal brokerage regarding gender role attitudes. First, using a connectome-based predictive model, we successfully identified the brain functional connectivity that predicts attitudinal diversity of respondents'' social network members. Brain regions that contributed most to the prediction included mentalizing regions known to be recruited in reading and understanding others’ belief states. This result was corroborated by leave-one-out cross-validation, fivefold cross-validation and external validation where the brain connectivity identified in one village was used to predict the attitudinal diversity in another independent village. Second, the association between functional connectivity and attitudinal diversity of social network members was contingent on a specific position in a social network, namely, the structural brokerage position where people have ties with two people who are not otherwise connected.     

Evidence of hippocampal learning in human infants

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Examining the Characteristics of Visuospatial Information Processing in Individuals with High-Functioning Autism

Information processing in individuals with autism is marked by a unique interplay of strengths and weaknesses that in concert distinguishes social cognition in autism from individuals with typical-functioning brains. In autism, difficulties with higher cognitive processing and enhancement of low-level visuospatial processing, such as in visual search tasks, may lead to diminished central coherence, which has the potential to hinder how an individual functions in social interactions where integration of components such as intention, emotion, and context paints the global picture necessary for social processing. A more thorough understanding of the cognitive and neural processes in autism is important for the advancement of intervention programs. The intention of this review is to discuss the implications of neuroimaging and behavioral studies that have analyzed the higher cognitive functions in individuals with high-functioning autism, with a particular emphasis on studies that have investigated visuospatial processing.     

Retinotopic organization of visual cortex in human infants

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