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Over 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain (CP), which causes more disability than any other medical condition in the United States at a cost of $560-$635 billion per year (Institute of Medicine, 2011). Opioid analgesics are frequently used to treat CP. However, long term use of opioids can cause brain changes such as opioid-induced hyperalgesia that, over time, increase pain sensation. Also, opioids fail to treat complex psychological factors that worsen pain-related disability, including beliefs about and emotional responses to pain. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be efficacious for CP. However, CBT generally does not focus on important factors needed for long-term functional improvement, including attainment of personal goals and the psychological flexibility to choose responses to pain. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has been recognized as an effective, non-pharmacologic treatment for a variety of CP conditions (Gutierrez et al., 2004). However, little is known about the neurologd increased participation in social roles. This study is one of the first to demonstrate that improved function across the DMN, SN, and FPN may drive the positive outcomes associated with ACT. This study contributes to the emerging evidence supporting the use of neurophysiological indices to characterize treatment effects of alternative and complementary mind-body therapies.Retrieval practice, relative to further study, leads to long-term memory enhancement known as the “testing effect.” The neurobiological correlates of the testing effect at retrieval, when the learning benefits of testing are expressed, have not been fully characterized. Participants learned Swahili-English word-pairs and were assigned randomly to either the Study-Group or the Test-Group. After a week delay, all participants completed a cued-recall test while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The Test-Group had superior memory for the word-pairs compared to the Study-Group. While both groups exhibited largely overlapping activations for remembered word-pairs, following an interaction analysis the Test-Group exhibited differential performance-related effects in the left putamen and left inferior parietal cortex near the supramarginal gyrus. The same analysis showed the Study-Group exhibited greater activations in the dorsal MPFC/pre-SMA and bilateral frontal operculum for remembered vs. forgotten word-pairs, whereas the Test-Group showed the opposite pattern of activation in the same regions. Thus, retrieval practice during training establishes a unique striatal-supramarginal network at retrieval that promotes enhanced memory performance. In contrast, study alone yields poorer memory but greater activations in frontal regions.Background The regulation of muscle force is a vital aspect of sensorimotor control, requiring intricate neural processes. While neural activity associated with upper extremity force control has been documented, extrapolation to lower extremity force control is limited. Knowledge of how the brain regulates force control for knee extension and flexion may provide insights as to how pathology or intervention impacts central control of movement. Objectives To develop and implement a neuroimaging-compatible force control paradigm for knee extension and flexion. Methods A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) safe load cell was used in a customized apparatus to quantify force (N) during neuroimaging (Philips Achieva 3T). Visual biofeedback and a target sinusoidal wave that fluctuated between 0 and 5 N was provided via an MRI-safe virtual reality display. Fifteen right leg dominant female participants (age = 20.3 ± 1.2 years, height = 1.6 ± 0.10 m, weight = 64.8 ± 6.4 kg) completed a knee extension and flexion force matdifferent between tasks. Conclusion Lower extremity force control results in unique activation strategies depending on if engaging knee extension or flexion, with knee flexion requiring increased neural activity (BOLD signal) for the same level of force and no difference in relative error. These fMRI compatible force control paradigms allow precise behavioral quantification of motor performance concurrent with brain activity for lower extremity sensorimotor function and may serve as a method for future research to investigate how pathologies affect lower extremity neuromuscular function.Objective To investigate the differences between patients returning to work and those who did not after brain tumor surgery. Methods Patients were evaluated before surgery and after 3 months. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, Trail-Making Test (parts A and B), 15-word Rey-Osterrieth Word List (immediate and delayed recall), F-A-S tests, and Karnosfky Performance Status were used to assess cognitive status, attention, executive functions, memory, word fluency, and functional status. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) used to evaluate emotional distress and disability were the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule. Clinical and work-related variables, PROMs, and cognitive tests were compared using chi-squared, t-test or Mann-Whitney U test. Results Sixty patients were included. Patients returning to work were 61.3 and 31.0% among people with meningioma and glioma, respectively. They reported lower postoperative disability and lesser home-to-work travel time. Patients with meningioma also showed better preoperative and postoperative attention and executive functions, better postoperative functional and cognitive status, and lower frequency of treatments. Conclusions These variables should be considered in a clinical context to plan interventions for people who need support during return to work and in future research to investigate preoperative and postoperative predictive factors of going back to work.The ability to learn sequential contingencies of actions for predicting future outcomes is indispensable for flexible behavior in many daily decision-making contexts. It remains open whether such ability may be enhanced by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). The present study combined tDCS with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate potential tDCS-induced effects on sequential decision-making and the neural mechanisms underlying such modulations. Offline tDCS and sham stimulation were applied over the left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in young male adults (N = 29, mean age = 23.4 years, SD = 3.2) in a double-blind between-subject design using a three-state Markov decision task. see more The results showed (i) an enhanced dlPFC hemodynamic response during the acquisition of sequential state transitions that is consistent with the findings from a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study; (ii) a tDCS-induced increase of the hemodynamic response in the dlPFC, but without accompanying performance-enhancing effects at the behavioral level; and (iii) a greater tDCS-induced upregulation of hemodynamic responses in the delayed reward condition that seems to be associated with faster decision speed.