Theta burst stimulation (TBS) protocols hold high promise in neuropsychological rehabilitation. Nevertheless, their ability to either decrease (continuous, cTBS) or increase (intermittent, iTBS) cortical excitability in areas other than the primary motor cortex, and their consistency modulating human behaviors with clinically relevant tasks remain to be fully established. The behavioral effects...

Abdalla, Marwa. "Can participants extract subtle information from gesturelike visual stimuli that are coordinated with speech without using any other cues?. ii To My Family, for their care and loving support iii ABSTRACT Embodied cognition is the reflection of an organism's interaction with its environment on its cognitive processes. We explored the question whether participants are able to pic...

OBJECTIVES To examine the relation between cognitive dysfunction and pseudobulbar features in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). METHODS The performance of two patient groups, ALS with pseudobulbar palsy (n = 24) and ALS without pseudobulbar palsy (n = 28), was compared with 28 healthy age matched controls on an extensive neuropsychological battery. Tests used were the nationa...

We introduce the differential efficiency algorithm, which partitions a perceptive space during unsupervised learning into categories and uses them to solve goal-planning and classification problems. This algorithm is inspired by a biological model of the cortex proposing the cortical column as an elementary unit. We validate the generality of this approach by testing it on four problems with co...

This study examined the relationship between child language skills and parent and child gestures of 58 youths with and without an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis. Frequencies and rates of total gesture use as well as five categories of gestures (deictic, conventional, beat, iconic, and metaphoric) were reliably coded during the collaborative Tower of Hanoi task. Children with ASD had l...

Conventional model-free reinforcement learning algorithms are limited to performing only one task, such as navigating to a single goal location in a maze, or reaching one goal state in the Tower of Hanoi block manipulation problem. It has been thought that only model-based algorithms could perform goal-directed actions, optimally adapting to new reward structures in the environment. In this wor...

The mediating and moderating roles of self-regulation in the associations of dispositional anger and fear to later conduct and anxiety symptoms were tested. Mothers and teachers rated children's anger and fear at 54 months (N = 191), and mothers reported on children's symptoms of anxiety and conduct disorders at 72 and 84 months (Ns = 169 and 144). Children's self-regulatory ability was assesse...