Brain

As infants develop, they preferentially move towards and respond to social cues - such as voices, faces and human gestures. At the same time, their brain develops a network of regions that specialise in translating these cues, known as the 'social brain'. However, a common observation in infants later diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is reduced sensitivity and attention towards these social cues during the first year of life. This apparent indifference to social cues is thought to ultimately hinder the normal development of the social brain at early developmental stages. A team of researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, now brings direct evidence of this hindered development during the toddler to pre-school years in autism. Their findings are published in the journal eLife.

The results of their study suggest that interventions targeting children's ability to respond to social cues at this critical early age could rewire the brain while it is still possible to do so, potentially restoring social brain development. Dr Holger Sperdin, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the UNIGE's Faculty of Medicine and lead author of the study, explains what he and his team set out to discover: "As toddlers with ASD have less preferential attention for social cues, we hypothesised that when we showed them moving social images, they would demonstrate differences in both the way they visually explore these images and in the way their brain networks process social information, compared with typically developing toddlers."

Eye-tracking technology

The team used an electrophysiological monitoring method called electroencephalography (EEG) to study the children's brain activity, and powerful eye-tracking technology to observe their gaze while they watched movies featuring human social interactions. They found that the children with ASD had different gaze patterns while watching the movies to the typically developing infants, and that this was accompanied by alterations in nerve cell connectivity and information flow in the brain.

In those with ASD, the team also observed what is known as 'increased driving' in two specific frequencies of brain waves - alpha and theta - as well as high levels of connectivity between nerve cells in certain regions in the brain. The theta brain wave frequency and the regions of the brain affected are both known to be important components of the 'social brain', and the alpha frequency is important for visual attention.

These findings represent the first evidence that differences in the visual exploration of images coincide with changes in connectivity between key regions of the social brain in very young children with ASD. Brain regions generating these brain wave frequencies may therefore develop differently in children with ASD compared with their typically developing peers.

"Our results show for the first time the presence of alterations in information flow from brain areas involved in social cue processing in toddlers and pre-schoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)," concludes senior author Professor Marie Schaer, Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. "These alterations within regions of the social brain are present at early stages of ASD and justify further investigation into whether therapeutic interventions targeting social orienting skills may help to remediate social brain development during this critical stage when neural plasticity is still possible."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study links doing one's homework, being interested and behaving responsibly in high school to better academic and career success as many as 50 years later. This effect, reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, holds true even after accounting for parental income, IQ and other factors known to influence achievement, researchers report.

"Yes, intelligence is important to life success and so is family socioeconomic status; we've known this for a while," said University of Illinois psychology professor Brent Roberts, who conducted the study with Rodica Damian of the University of Houston and Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen. "Studies have shown that personality traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness also correspond to higher academic and career achievement. But these are traits you're more or less born with. We wanted to know if factors under the control of the individual at a young age might also play a role."

The study analyzed decades of data collected by the American Institutes for Research beginning in 1960 and continuing to the present. The original data set included more than 370,000 students. High school participants were originally tested on academic, cognitive and behavioral characteristics in 1960 and also responded to follow-up surveys in later years. The new analysis looked at the initial student tests and their responses 11 years and 50 years later.

Of the 1,952 participants randomly selected from those who responded to surveys 50 years later, "those who showed more interest in high school and had higher writing skills reported earning higher incomes," said Spengler, who led the study. "They also tended to have higher occupational prestige than their peers when they showed responsible behaviors as a student." This was in addition to the gains associated with IQ, family income and personality traits such as conscientiousness, she said.

Further analyses revealed that education was likely the factor mediating the relationship between high school behavior and later success in life.

"It seems that these early individual differences are relevant across the life span through the lens of education," the researchers wrote.

While the study kept track of participants over a period of 50 years, the methods used only point to an association between factors and outcomes and do not prove that good behavior in high school inevitably leads to career success later in life, Damian said.

"This study does, however, highlight the possibility that certain behaviors at crucial periods could have long-term consequences for a person's life," she said.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Three-month-old babies cannot sit up or roll over, yet they are already capable of learning patterns from simply looking at the world around them, according to a recent Northwestern University study published in PLOS One.

For the first time, the researchers show that 3- and 4-month-old infants can successfully detect visual patterns and generalize them to new sequences.

Throughout the animal kingdom, being able to detect not only objects and events, but also the relations among them, is key to survival. Among humans, this capacity is exceptionally abstract. When we learn a rule or pattern in one domain, such as an alternating pattern of lights, we readily abstract this pattern and apply it to another domain -- for example, an alternating pattern of sounds.

This ability, known as "abstract rule learning," is a signature of human perception and cognition. What we do not know is how early it develops.

Prior research documented that 4-month-old infants successfully abstract rules from speech sounds and tone sequences, but failed to abstract rules in the visual domain, such as from patterns of objects. This presented a puzzle: Why were infants successful at detecting abstract patterns from the sounds that they heard, but not from the objects they saw?

New research from Sandra Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, and her Northwestern colleagues, former doctoral student Brock Ferguson, and Steven Franconeri, professor of psychology, solves this puzzle.

"If you present infants with the stimuli in a more appropriate way for the visual system, they can learn abstract rules visually, just as they can from speech," Ferguson said.

The researchers showed 40 infants patterned sequences of different kinds of dogs. For example, infants learning an "ABA" pattern might see a picture of an Alaskan malamute (A) followed by a picture of a German shepherd (B), and finally another Alaskan malamute (A). Infants saw several "ABA" sequences, each time with different kinds of dogs.

Then, the researchers presented infants with two new sequences with new kinds of dogs that the infants had not yet seen. The elements in each sequence were identical -- only the pattern in which they were presented differed. One sequence followed the same ABA pattern (terrier, setter, terrier); the other followed a new AAB pattern (terrier, terrier, setter). Measuring how long the infants looked at each of these two sequences allowed the researchers to gauge their attention.

Although the elements in the AAB and ABA sequences were identical, infants noticed the different patterns. This documents infants' ability to learn abstract rules visually.

The infants' success in this experiment reflects something key about the visual system, Waxman explained. Unlike all prior experiments, infants in this study could see all three images together on the screen. The researchers note that the auditory system most effectively abstracts patterns from sequences that unfold over time (like listening to language or music), while the visual system is better at extracting patterns from sequences that are structured in space.

"Auditory learning is able to get patterns like ABB or ABA, just by hearing them in a sequence," said Waxman, a faculty fellow in the University's Institute for Policy Research. "The visual system needs to take a moment to see all the things together."

The study results indicate that infants are learning such abstract rules through seeing from a very early age.

"The basic capacity of abstract rule learning has its origins in infancy," Waxman said. "Babies are doing really powerful abstraction from just their observation of the world."

"Very young infants learn abstract rules in the visual modality" was recently published in PLOS One.

The hormone helps prime cells for implantation, a vital stage in early pregnancy when a fertilised egg attaches to the womb lining, the study suggests.

The discovery - made by testing tissue from women aged in their forties - could help scientists develop ways to improve fertility.

Each month, as part of the menstrual cycle, hormones send chemical signals to cells in the womb lining to create conditions to support pregnancy. Fertilised eggs are extremely sensitive to changes in the womb lining, but the exact environment needed for healthy implantation is unknown.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh tested the effects of a hormone known as DHEA on healthy tissue donated by women undergoing unrelated surgery.

They found that treating womb lining cells with DHEA in a dish doubled the level of key proteins associated with healthy implantation in the tissue.

DHEA treatment also increased the production of active androgens - hormones found in high levels in men - suggesting that these could underlie the improvement.

The study also suggests that levels of DHEA - which are known to decline significantly with age - could play a role in infertility in later life, researchers say.

They caution that it is too early to say if treatments could help women with fertility issues.

The study, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC).

Lead author Dr Douglas Gibson, from the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research at the University of Edinburgh, said: "A fertilised egg will implant only if the conditions are just right and we were excited to see that DHEA and androgens might help improve this environment in cells. The findings will help us develop studies for potential therapies but more research is needed before we can tell if this approach could be used to help women who are struggling to conceive."

Dr Stephen Meader, Programme Manager for Reproductive Health at the MRC, said: "This study is important in learning more about what's required for a successful implantation and healthy pregnancy. This research may be in its early stages, but it's worthwhile because it lays the groundwork to uncovering potential treatments down the road to help women trying to conceive."

Improving how mental health patients perceive themselves could be critical in treating them, according to a study from the University of Waterloo.

The study found that youth with psychiatric disorders currently receiving inpatient services reported lower self-concept, particularly global self-worth, compared to those receiving outpatient services.

"This was the first study that examined youth with psychiatric disorder by comparing what type of service they were receiving and whether that was associated with self-concept," said Mark Ferro, the Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences at Waterloo. "We know that global self-worth is lower in the inpatient group and we know from other research that lower self-concept is a precursor to other more serious mental health problems."

The study examined 47 youth aged 8-17 years who were receiving inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services at McMaster's Children Hospital in Hamilton. The participants' self-concept was measured using the Self-Perception Profile for Children and Adolescents.

Self-concept might be an important aspect to consider when implementing treatment programs to improve the mental health of youth who are hospitalized.

"Because youths who are in the inpatient service have a lower self-concept, therapies within their overall treatment program aiming to improve self-worth might be worthwhile," Ferro said. "Interventions to improve an individual's self-concept or self-perception would be complementary to some of the more pressing needs within child and youth inpatient psychiatric services."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - ORCHARD PARK, New York - (February 20, 2017) - In the cover article of Tuesday's issue of Oncotarget, James Frost, MD, PhD, Kenneth Pienta, MD, and the late Donald Coffey, Ph.D., use a theory of physical and biophysical symmetry to derive a new conceptualization of cancer. Co-author Dr. Coffey, ex-deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Professor of Urology, died before this paper was published at 85. (Audio paper available here)

In physics, symmetry and the loss or breaking of symmetry refers to states of change. A perfect snowflake is rotationally symmetrical because each iteration in its pattern around the circle remains unchanged. If the snowflake should partially melt anywhere, there's a change in the snowflake's radial pattern and thus the symmetry is broken.

Because so many of the molecules that make life possible are constantly changing and interacting, life itself could be considered to be a stable rhythm of symmetry and symmetry breaking, Dr. Coffey and his colleagues write.

"The work was stimulated by many conversations I had with Don Coffey about the fundamental nature and fascination of symmetry we experienced," said lead author James Frost, M.D., Ph.D., and adjunct professor and professor emeritus of radiology at John Hopkins. "Including concepts of biology and life as a state between perfect order and chaos. That is, life is a condition of partially but not completely broken symmetry."

Symmetry has been useful in simplifying and understanding complex physical problems. Likewise, Dr. Frost and his colleagues believe that understanding cancer through the framework of symmetry can help reveal new ways to understand cancer. Because cancer rises out of a dysfunction in life's fundamental machinery, the study suggests that cancer could be considered to be a symmetry breaking process that disrupts biology's normal rhythm.

That means there may be a way to understand cancer at the point of this disruption that biology has not yet discovered.

"We lay out the argument that therapies directed to destroying cancer at a system level - rather than at the level of a single molecular target - could be directed at points in the cancer network where symmetry is maximally broken and the system is most vulnerable," said lead author, Dr. Frost. "Conversely, could points of broken symmetry be targeted for repair in order to restore the normal homeostasis of the cell? That's a much more futuristic aspect of the research."

In the future, Dr. Frost hopes that cancer biologists and clinical oncologists will follow up with more in-depth theoretical research and empirical investigation.

A video interview with the first author and an audio version of the interview is also available online. Written spotlight on Dr. James Frost and audio version available as well.

Researchers have found that excess levels of calcium in brain cells may lead to the formation of toxic clusters that are the hallmark of Parkinson's disease.

The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that calcium can mediate the interaction between small membranous structures inside nerve endings, which are important for neuronal signalling in the brain, and alpha-synuclein, the protein associated with Parkinson's disease. Excess levels of either calcium or alpha-synuclein may be what starts the chain reaction that leads to the death of brain cells.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature Communications, represent another step towards understanding how and why people develop Parkinson's. According to the charity Parkinson's UK, one in every 350 adults in the UK - an estimated 145,000 in all - currently has the condition, but as yet it remains incurable.

Parkinson's disease is one of a number of neurodegenerative diseases caused when naturally occurring proteins fold into the wrong shape and stick together with other proteins, eventually forming thin filament-like structures called amyloid fibrils. These amyloid deposits of aggregated alpha-synuclein, also known as Lewy bodies, are the sign of Parkinson's disease.

Curiously, it hasn't been clear until now what alpha-synuclein actually does in the cell: why it's there and what it's meant to do. It is implicated in various processes, such as the smooth flow of chemical signals in the brain and the movement of molecules in and out of nerve endings, but exactly how it behaves is unclear.

"Alpha-synuclein is a very small protein with very little structure, and it needs to interact with other proteins or structures in order to become functional, which has made it difficult to study," said senior author Dr Gabriele Kaminski Schierle from Cambridge's Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Thanks to super-resolution microscopy techniques, it is now possible to look inside cells to observe the behaviour of alpha-synuclein. To do so, Kaminski Schierle and her colleagues isolated synaptic vesicles, part of the nerve cells that store the neurotransmitters which send signals from one nerve cell to another.

In neurons, calcium plays a role in the release of neurotransmitters. The researchers observed that when calcium levels in the nerve cell increase, such as upon neuronal signalling, the alpha-synuclein binds to synaptic vesicles at multiple points causing the vesicles to come together. This may indicate that the normal role of alpha-synuclein is to help the chemical transmission of information across nerve cells.

"This is the first time we've seen that calcium influences the way alpha-synuclein interacts with synaptic vesicles," said Dr Janin Lautenschl?ger, the paper's first author. "We think that alpha-synuclein is almost like a calcium sensor. In the presence of calcium, it changes its structure and how it interacts with its environment, which is likely very important for its normal function."

"There is a fine balance of calcium and alpha-synuclein in the cell, and when there is too much of one or the other, the balance is tipped and aggregation begins, leading to Parkinson's disease," said co-first author Dr Amberley Stephens.

The imbalance can be caused by a genetic doubling of the amount of alpha-synuclein (gene duplication), by an age-related slowing of the breakdown of excess protein, by an increased level of calcium in neurons that are sensitive to Parkinson's, or an associated lack of calcium buffering capacity in these neurons.

Understanding the role of alpha-synuclein in physiological or pathological processes may aid in the development of new treatments for Parkinson's disease. One possibility is that drug candidates developed to block calcium, for use in heart disease for instance, might also have potential against Parkinson's disease.

An international partnership of the Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS), the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, has used multiple modes of light to uncover details hidden beneath the visible surface of Pablo Picasso's painting "La Miséreuse accroupie" (The Crouching Woman), a major work from the artist's Blue Period.

The 1902 oil painting, owned by the AGO in Toronto, Canada, depicts a crouching and cloaked woman, painted in white, blues, grays and greens.

With knowledge of an underlying landscape revealed long ago by X-ray radiography at the AGO, researchers used non-invasive portable imaging techniques, including infrared reflectance hyperspectral imaging adapted by the National Gallery of Art and then an X-ray fluorescence imaging instrument developed at Northwestern, to detail buried images connected to other works by Picasso -- including a watercolor recently sold at auction -- as well as the presence of a landscape likely by another Barcelona painter underneath "La Miséreuse accroupie."

Marc Walton, a research professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and co-director of NU-ACCESS, will discuss the collective new findings at a Feb. 17 press briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Austin, Texas. He will present a full-scale reproduction of Picasso's iterative adaptations leading to the final painting. The briefing, "Technology Peers Into Picasso's Art," will be held at 9 a.m. CST in Room 6, Level 3, of the Austin Convention Center.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: A separate study of Picasso's work in three dimensions will be discussed at the same press briefing. Francesca Casadio, the Art Institute of Chicago's Grainger Executive Director of Conservation and Science and co-director of NU-ACCESS, will talk about the findings from an unprecedented study of five decades of Picasso's bronzes in the collection of the Musée national Picasso-Paris.]

"Picasso had no qualms about changing things during the painting process," Walton said. "Our international team -- consisting of scientists, a curator and a conservator -- has begun to tease apart the complexity of 'La Miséreuse accroupie,' uncovering subtle changes made by Picasso as he worked toward his final vision."

NU-ACCESS members who are studying "La Miséreuse accroupie" are Walton, Casadio and postdoctoral fellows Emeline Pouyet and Gianluca Pastorelli.

The researchers used non-invasive methods they adapted to the study of paintings. The state-of-the-art tools enabled the scientists to analyze the painting relatively quickly inside the museum. The key findings of the multidisciplinary international study include:

Picasso painted over another painter's work after rotating it 90 degrees to the right, using some of the landscape forms in his own final composition of "La Miséreuse accroupie." Picasso incorporated the lines of the cliff edges into the woman's back, for example.

Picasso also made a major compositional change, the researchers report. The artist initially painted the woman with a right arm and hand holding a disk but then covered them with her cloak in the final work.

By closely observing "La Miséreuse accroupie," AGO's conservation department, now led in this project by senior conservator of paintings Sandra Webster-Cook, had observed distinct textures and contrasting underlying color that peaked through the crack lines and did not match the visible composition. X-ray radiography was the first non-invasive tool used to uncover hidden information in "La Miséreuse accroupie"; it revealed a horizontal landscape by a different Barcelona painter, whose identity remains unknown, under the visible surface of Picasso's painting.

John Delaney, senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art, then studied the painting with infrared reflectance hyperspectral imaging, which records underlying images depending on their relative transparency of the paint layers. He found an arm and a disk under the surface of the painting. Delaney's imaging method provides improved visibility of earlier compositional painted elements.

For a more detailed understanding of the repositioned arm, NU-ACCESS scientists next investigated the painting using images generated by their X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanner. The NU-ACCESS team traveled twice to the AGO in Canada with their portable tools for the study.

This system produces grayscale images showing the distribution of elements associated with various pigments of the painting. The scientists were able to analyze 70 percent of the painting in 24 hours. Together with micro-samples extracted from strategic locations, the XRF results, along with further images generated by Delaney from the hyperspectral reflectance, reveal the steps of creation taken by Picasso.

The iron- and chromium-based pigments of the surface layer correlated with the painting's current structure and its palette of mostly blues (painted with the iron-based Prussian blue and with ultramarine, Picasso's Blue Period blue of choice) and yellow-greens (painted with chromium-based yellows). The elemental maps of cadmium- and lead-based pigments, however, revealed the presence of the woman's right arm and hand beneath the visible surface.

The imaging techniques developed by Northwestern and the National Gallery have allowed Kenneth Brummel, the AGO's assistant curator of modern art, to better understand Picasso's style, influences and process.

"When we saw the rendering of the lead elemental map, it became clear to me that the arm hidden under the visible surface of 'La Miséreuse accroupie' is the same as the proper right arm of a crouching woman in a Picasso watercolor recently sold at auction," Brummel said. The watercolor is titled "Femme assise" (1902).

Images generated by Delaney -- through the selection of different bandwidths in the near infrared -- confirmed the relationship between "La Miséreuse accroupie" and the watercolor.

"After seeing the lead map from the XRF scanning, we were able to make a map of pigment lead white, which, when overlaid with the false color infrared, gives a more complete image of an upstretched arm, sleeve, disk and fingers," Delaney said.

"We now are able to develop a chronology within the painting structure to tell a story about the artist's developing style and possible influences," said Sandra Webster-Cook, AGO's senior conservator of paintings.

Further details about the collaboration's research findings and the implications on Picasso's developing style and influences will be revealed June 1 at the American Institute of Conservation annual meeting in Houston.

Questions raised by this research on Picasso's influence and style during his Blue Period will be further explored in a Picasso Blue Period exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 2020 through 2021.

Computer scientist to discuss use of algorithms in Picasso study at Feb. 17 AAAS session

In a related scientific session the afternoon of Feb. 17 at the AAAS annual meeting, Northwestern's Aggelos Katsaggelos will explain how he has paired signal processing technology with data collected from the advanced imaging tools used to extract images hidden beneath the surface of "La Miséreuse accroupie." In addition to presenting the general findings of the investigation by the NU-ACCESS team, Katsaggelos will highlight the use of super-resolution approaches to estimate high-resolution XRF images and how these data are used in the art historical interpretations of the painting.

Katsaggelos, the Joseph Cummings Professor in the McCormick School's department of electrical engineering and computer science and an NU-ACCESS faculty member, used computational methods to reconstruct the missing pixels of the X-ray fluorescence signal from the acquisition of only approximately 25 percent of the total pixels.

Katsaggelos will speak at the scientific session "Analyzing Picasso: Scientific Innovation, Instrumentation and Education," to be held from 1:30 to 3 p.m. CST Saturday, Feb. 17, at the AAAS meeting. The symposium, co-organized by Walton, will be held in Room 17B of the Austin Convention Center. In addition to Katsaggelos, the event will include two other speakers discussing different aspects of Picasso's work. (See details below.)