Ricerc@Sapienza

Previous studies have shown that individuals with heroin and cocaine addiction prefer to use these drugs in distinct settings: mostly at home in the case of heroin and mostly outside the home in the case of cocaine. Here we investigated whether the context would modulate the affective and neural responses to these drugs in a similar way. First, we used a novel emotional task to assess the affective state produced by heroin or cocaine in different settings, based on the recollections of male and female drug users.

Brain systems underlying human memory function have been classically investigated studying patients with selective memory impairments. The discovery of rare individuals who have highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) provides, instead, an opportunity to investigate the brain systems underlying enhanced memory. Here, we carried out an fMRI investigation of a group of subjects identified as having HSAM. During fMRI scanning, eight subjects with HSAM and 21 control subjects were asked to retrieve autobiographical memories (AMs) as well as non-AMs (e.g., examples of animals).

Introduction: The longitudinal trajectories of functional brain dynamics and the impact of genetic risk factors in individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease are poorly understood. Methods: In a large-scale monocentric cohort of 224 amyloid stratified individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease, default mode network (DMN) resting state functional connectivity (FC) was investigated between two serial time points across 2 years. Results: Widespread DMN FC changes were shown in frontal and posterior areas, as well as in the right hippocampus.

Since the introduction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), several computational approaches have been developed to examine the effect of the morphology and arrangement of blood vessels on the blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signal in the brain. In the present work, we implemented the original Ogawa's model using a numerical simulation based on the finite element method (FEM) instead of the analytical models.