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The phonological deficit in dyslexia is associated with altered low-gamma oscillatory function in left auditory cortex, but a causal relationship between oscillatory function and phonemic processing has never been established. After confirming a deficit at 30 Hz with electroencephalography (EEG), we applied 20 minutes of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to transiently restore this activity in adults with dyslexia. The intervention significantly improved phonological processing and reading accuracy as measured immediately after tACS. The effect occurred selectively for a 30-Hz stimulation in the dyslexia group. Importantly, we observed that the focal intervention over the left auditory cortex also decreased 30-Hz activity in the right superior temporal cortex, resulting in reinstating a left dominance for the oscillatory response. These findings establish a causal role of neural oscillations in phonological processing and offer solid neurophysiological grounds for a potential correction of low-gamma anomalies and for alleviating the phonological deficit in dyslexia.

Mental disorders have become a major concern in public health, and they are one of the main causes of the overall disease burden worldwide. Social media platforms allow us to observe the activities, thoughts, and feelings of people's daily lives, including those of patients suffering from mental disorders. There are studies that have analyzed the influence of mental disorders, including depression, in the behavior of social media users, but they have been usually focused on messages written in English. The study aimed to identify the linguistic features of tweets in Spanish and the behavioral patterns of Twitter users who generate them, which could suggest signs of depression. This study was developed in 2 steps. In the first step, the selection of users and the compilation of tweets were performed. A total of 3 datasets of tweets were created, a depressive users dataset (made up of the timeline of 90 users who explicitly mentioned that they suffer from depression), a depressive tweets dataset (a manual selection of tweets from the previous users, which included expressions indicative of depression), and a control dataset (made up of the timeline of 450 randomly selected users). In the second step, the comparison and analysis of the 3 datasets of tweets were carried out. In comparison with the control dataset, the depressive users are less active in posting tweets, doing it more frequently between 23:00 and 6:00 (P<.001). The percentage of nouns used by the control dataset almost doubles that of the depressive users (P<.001). By contrast, the use of verbs is more common in the depressive users dataset (P<.001). The first-person singular pronoun was by far the most used in the depressive users dataset (80%), and the first- and the second-person plural pronouns were the least frequent (0.4% in both cases), this distribution being different from that of the control dataset (P<.001). Emotions related to sadness, anger, and disgust were more common in the depressive users and depressive tweets datasets, with significant differences when comparing these datasets with the control dataset (P<.001). As for negation words, they were detected in 34% and 46% of tweets in among depressive users and in depressive tweets, respectively, which are significantly different from the control dataset (P<.001). Negative polarity was more frequent in the depressive users (54%) and depressive tweets (65%) datasets than in the control dataset (43.5%; P<.001). Twitter users who are potentially suffering from depression modify the general characteristics of their language and the way they interact on social media. On the basis of these changes, these users can be monitored and supported, thus introducing new opportunities for studying depression and providing additional health care services to people with this disorder.

Based on the hypothesis of two maintenance mechanisms of verbal information in working memory, an articulatory loop and an attentional executive loop, Barrouillet et al. predicted and observed that facilitating the optimal use and separation of these two systems results in a strong increase in recall performance. They developed for this purpose the maxispan procedure, in which participants cumulatively rehearse aloud a limited number of the first items of the series (i.e., three or four) and keep rehearsing them until the end of the series before recall. Beyond increasing recall performance, the model also predicts that the maxispan procedure should also abolish the phonological similarity effect (PSE, the poorer recall of phonologically similar than dissimilar items) in both the rehearsed and the nonrehearsed items by permitting the perfect maintenance of the former in a nonoverloaded articulatory loop and preventing storage of phonological traces of the latter in the attentional system. However, the PSE should reappear if too many items are verbally rehearsed in the maxispan procedure. In this case, the overload of the articulatory loop should lead to offload its content into the attentional system where phonologically similar traces are prone to confusion. We tested and verified these hypotheses in two experiments.

Synchrony in social groups may confer significant evolutionary advantages by improving group cohesion and social interaction. However, the neurobiological mechanisms translating social synchrony into refined social information transmission between interacting individuals are still elusive. In two successively conducted experiments involving a total of 306 healthy volunteers, we explored the involvement of the neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) in reciprocal social interaction. First, we show that synchronous social interactions evoke heightened endogenous OXT release in dyadic partners. In a second step, we examined the consequences of elevated OXT concentrations on emotion transmission by intranasally administering synthetic OXT before recording emotional expressions. Intriguingly, our data demonstrate that the subjects’ facial and vocal expressiveness of fear and happiness is enhanced after OXT compared with placebo administration. Collectively, our findings point to a central role of social synchrony in facilitating reciprocal communication between individuals via heightened OXT signaling. Elevated OXT concentrations among synchronized individuals seem to augment the partners’ emotional expressiveness, thereby contributing to improved transmission of emotional information in social communication.

In this study we investigated the association between instrumental music training in childhood and outcomes closely related to music training as well as those more distantly related. Children who received at least three years (M = 4.6 years) of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills). Duration of training also predicted these outcomes. Contrary to previous research, instrumental music training was not associated with heightened spatial skills, phonemic awareness, or mathematical abilities. While these results are correlational only, the strong predictive effect of training duration suggests that instrumental music training may enhance auditory discrimination, fine motor skills, vocabulary, and nonverbal reasoning. Alternative explanations for these results are discussed.

Working memory is important for a wide range of high-level cognitive activities. Previous studies have shown that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a critical role in working memory and that behavioral training of working memory can alter the activity of DLPFC. However, it is unclear whether the activation in the DLPFC can be self-regulated and whether any self-regulation can affect working memory behavior. The recently emerged real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) technique enables the individuals to acquire self-control of localized brain activation, potentially inducing desirable behavioral changes. In the present study, we employed the rtfMRI technique to train subjects to up-regulate the activation in the left DLPFC, which is linked to verbal working memory. After two rtfMRI training sessions, activation in the left DLPFC was significantly increased, whereas the control group that received sham feedback did not show any increase in DLPFC activation. Pre- and post-training behavioral tests indicated that performance of the digit span and letter memory task was significantly improved in the experimental group. Between-group comparison of behavioral changes showed that the increase of digit span in the experimental group was significantly greater than that in the control group. These findings provide preliminary evidence that working memory performance can be improved through learned regulation of activation in associated brain regions using rtfMRI.

Speech understanding can be thought of as inferring progressively more abstract representations from a rapidly unfolding signal. One common view of this process holds that lower-level information is discarded as soon as higher-level units have been inferred. However, there is evidence that subcategorical information about speech percepts is not immediately discarded, but is maintained past word boundaries and integrated with subsequent input. Previous evidence for such subcategorical information maintenance has come from paradigms that lack many of the demands typical to everyday language use. We ask whether information maintenance is also possible under more typical constraints, and in particular whether it can facilitate accent adaptation. In a web-based paradigm, participants listened to isolated foreign-accented words in one of three conditions: subtitles were displayed concurrently with the speech, after speech offset, or not displayed at all. The delays between speech offset and subtitle presentation were manipulated. In a subsequent test phase, participants then transcribed novel words in the same accent without the aid of subtitles. We find that subtitles facilitate accent adaptation, even when displayed with a 6 second delay. Listeners thus maintained subcategorical information for sufficiently long to allow it to benefit adaptation. We close by discussing what type of information listeners maintain-subcategorical phonetic information, or just uncertainty about speech categories.

The role of state anxiety and state fear in placebo effects is still to be determined. We aimed to investigate the effect of fear of movement-related pain (FMRP) and contextual pain related anxiety (CPRA) on the magnitude of placebo analgesia induced by verbal suggestion. Fifty-six female participants completed a modified voluntary joystick movement paradigm (VJMP) where half participated in a predictable pain condition (PC), in which one of the joystick movements is always followed by pain and the other movement is never followed by pain, and half in an unpredictable pain condition (UC), in which pain was delivered unpredictably. By varying the level of pain predictability, FMRP and CPRA were induced in PC and UC respectively. Colour stimuli were presented at the beginning of each trail. Half of the participants were verbally informed that the green or red colour indicated less painful stimuli (experimental groups), the other half did not receive any suggestion (control groups). We measured self-reported pain intensity, expectancy of pain intensity (PC only), pain related fear and anxiety (eyeblink startle response and self-ratings) and avoidance behaviour (movement-onset latency and duration). The results indicate that the placebo effect was successfully induced in both experimental conditions. In the PC, the placebo effect was predicted by expectancy. Despite the fact that FMRP and CPRA were successfully induced, no difference was found in the magnitude of the placebo effect between PC and UC. Concluding, we did not find a divergent effect of fear and anxiety on placebo analgesia.

Oxygen is critical to normal brain functioning and development. In high altitude where the oxygen concentration and pressure are very low, human cognitive capability such as working memory has been found to be jeopardized. Such effect might persist with long-term high-altitude residence. The current study investigated the verbal working memory of 28 high-altitude residents with blood level oxygen dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in contrast with that of the 30 sea level residents. All of the subjects were healthy college students, matched on their age, gender ratio and social-economic status; they also did not show any difference on their hemoglobin level. The high-altitude subjects showed longer reaction time and decreased response accuracy in behavioral performance. Both groups showed activation in the typical regions associated with the 2-back verbal working memory task, and the behavioral performance of both groups showed significant correlations with the BOLD signal change amplitude and Granger causality values (as a measure of the interregional effective connectivity) between these regions. With group comparison statistics, the high-altitude subjects showed decreased activation at the inferior and middle frontal gyrus, the middle occipital and the lingual gyrus, the pyramis of vermis, as well as the thalamus. In conclusion, the current study revealed impairment in verbal working memory among high-altitude residents, which might be associated with the impact of prolonged chronic hypoxia exposure on the brain functionality.

The way we talk can influence how we are perceived by others. Whereas previous studies have started to explore the influence of social goals on syntactic alignment, in the current study, we additionally investigated whether syntactic alignment effectively influences conversation partners' perception of the speaker. To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which we can measure the effect of social goals on the strength of syntactic alignment for one participant (primed participant), while simultaneously obtaining usable social opinions about them from their conversation partner (the evaluator). In Study 1, participants' desire to be rated favorably by their partner was manipulated by assigning pairs to a Control (i.e., primed participants did not know they were being evaluated) or Evaluation context (i.e., primed participants knew they were being evaluated). Surprisingly, results showed no significant difference in the strength with which primed participants aligned their syntactic choices with their partners' choices. In a follow-up study, we used a Directed Evaluation context (i.e., primed participants knew they were being evaluated and were explicitly instructed to make a positive impression). However, again, there was no evidence supporting the hypothesis that participants' desire to impress their partner influences syntactic alignment. With respect to the influence of syntactic alignment on perceived likeability by the evaluator, a negative relationship was reported in Study 1: the more primed participants aligned their syntactic choices with their partner, the more that partner decreased their likeability rating after the experiment. However, this effect was not replicated in the Directed Evaluation context of Study 2. In other words, our results do not support the conclusion that speakers' desire to be liked affects how much they align their syntactic choices with their partner, nor is there convincing evidence that there is a reliable relationship between syntactic alignment and perceived likeability.