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“The development of a new generation of hand prostheses that can ideally approximate the human ‘physiological’ performance in terms of movement dexterity and sensory feedback for amputees still poses many open research challenges. The most promising approaches aim at establishing a direct connection with either the

central or the peripheral human nervous system by means of invasive or non-invasive neural interfaces. This paper starts from the assumption that a major contribution to derive functional and technical specifications for such interfaces, and even for the whole prosthetic system, can stem from in-depth analysis of the nervous system reorganization following limb amputation. Neuroplasticity, can be modulated by the use of hand prostheses both in the acute phase and in the long-term. We hereby critically review the literature concerning neuroplastic phenomena in amputees, ISRIB in vitro in terms of changes at different CNS

levels, particularly for their implications on the development of bidirectional neural interfaces for cybernetic hand prostheses. Our analysis of the literature demonstrates that: (1) the level of CNS reorganization could be used as a parameter of the effectiveness achieved by the prosthetic device and its interfaces, in restoring the hand physiological functionality, (2) the prosthetic system could be seen as a neurorehabilitation tool, as it could induce reduction in aberrant plasticity and promote ‘good’ plasticity and (3) new generations of ‘natural’ interfaces can be developed by fully exploiting neuroplastic phenomena to restore neural connections

originally governing the lost limb and linking them Selleckchem Oligomycin A to the prosthetic system. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“While the amygdalar role in fear conditioning is well established, it also appears to be involved in a wide spectrum of other functions concerning emotional information. For example, the amygdala is thought to be involved in guiding spatial attention to emotionally relevant information such as the eye region in faces, and it gets activated differentially during different tasks. Here, we propose that the guidance of feature-based attention is the basis for the involvement of the amygdala in these seemingly disparate functions. Feature-based attention usually precedes spatial click here attention, and performing different tasks usually requires attending to different features. Although to date, no experiments have specifically tested the amygdalar role in feature-based attention, studies showing that the amygdala responds to simple elements, and findings of amygdalar involvement in non-spatial forms of attention hint at such a role. Our hypothesis that the amygdala guides feature-based attention builds on earlier proposals that the amygdala guides spatial attention and assesses biological relevance, but it is more specific and accounts for the failure to find amygdalar activation when spatial cues guide attention.