Similar results occurred with different task instructions (compare the length of the left-sided line segment to the right-sided segment) and in the presence or absence of central fixation marks. These results obtained in normal participants support attentional CP-690550 accounts of biased line bisection in neglect patients. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“There is increasing evidence that Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with elevated anxiety that is non-social in nature, including generalised anxiety and fears. To date very little research has examined the cognitive processes associated with this anxiety. In the present

research, attentional bias for non-social threatening images in WS was examined using a dot-probe paradigm. Participants this website were 16 individuals with WS aged between

13 and 34 years and two groups of typically developing controls matched to the WS group on chronological age and attentional control ability, respectively. The WS group exhibited a significant attention bias towards threatening images. In contrast, no bias was found for group matched on attentional control and a slight bias away from threat was found in the chronological age matched group. The results are contrasted with recent findings suggesting that individuals with WS do not show an attention bias for threatening faces and discussed in relation to neuroimaging research showing elevated amygdala activation in response to threatening non-social scenes in WS. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Over the last years, increasing evidence has fuelled the hypothesis that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a condition of altered brain functional connectivity. The great majority

of these empirical studies relies on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which has a relatively poor temporal resolution. Only a handful of studies has examined networks emerging from dynamic coherence at the millisecond buy Docetaxel resolution and there are no investigations of coherence at the lowest frequencies in the power spectrum which has recently been shown to reflect long-range cortico-cortical connections. Here we used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess dynamic brain connectivity in ASD focusing in the low-frequency (delta) range. We found that connectivity patterns were distinct in ASD and control populations and reflected a double dissociation: ASD subjects lacked long-range connections, with a most prominent deficit in fronto-occipital connections. Conversely, individuals with ASD showed increased short-range connections in lateral-frontal electrodes. This effect between categories showed a consistent parametric dependency: as ASD severity increased, short-range coherence was more pronounced and long-range coherence decreased. Theoretical arguments have been proposed arguing that distinct patterns of connectivity may result in networks with different efficiency in transmission of information.