Bilateral simultaneous transcranial Doppler monitoring of flow velocity changes during visuospatial and verbal working memory tasks

Abstract

Twenty-two normal volunteers were studied by simultaneous bilateral transcranial Doppler (TCD) monitoring of flow velocity changes in the middle cerebral arteries during visuospatial and verbal working memory tasks. All tasks were visually presented material; they required full engagement of subjects during the study, similar attention demands and a manual response when the appropriate target was recognized. Stimuli were presented tachistoscopically. Each task produced significant and distinct effects on flow velocity with respect to baseline values. When side-to-side comparisons were performed, a significantly higher increase in flow velocity was observed in the right middle cerebral artery (MCA) compared with the left one during the visuospatial task (P < 0.005). Our findings agree with results of recent studies using PET which show lateralized activation during working memory tasks. The high temporal resolution of this technique suggests that further application in cerebral flow change monitoring during neuropsychological studies could be promising.

A transcranial Doppler sonography study of shoot/don’t-shoot responding

“…Therefore, as the workload increases in brain regions, BFV to those regions increases. For example, visual and verbal tasks significantly increase BFV from baseline conditions (Bulla-Hellwig, Vollmer, Götzen, Skreczek, & Hartje, 1996;Cupini et al, 1996;Silvestrini, Cupini, Matteis, Troisi, & Caltagirone, 1994). posterior parietal arteries, and the lateral orbitofrontal and ascending frontal arteries (Netter, 1989), and thus profuses approximately 80% of the brain (Stroobant & Vingerhoets, 2000).…”

“…In the present study, we focused on a physiological measure that records brain activation as an indication of task-induced mental workload in each of the cerebral hemispheres. Researchers have used functional transcranial Doppler (TCD) sonography to investigate Early research that has used TCD to measure BFV has focused on hemispheric differences in various verbal and visual tasks (Bulla-Hellwig et al, 1996;Cupini et al, 1996;Silvestrini et al, 1994). However, more recently, TCD has been used to investigate hemispheric differences in a broadening array of cognitive tasks.…”

Cerebral lateralization and general intelligence: Gender differences in a transcranial Doppler study

“…Cerebral lateralization could be studied using TCD (Bulla-Hellweg, Vollmer, Gö tzen, Skreczek, & Hartje, 1996;Cupini et al, 1996;Droste, Harders, & Rastogi, 1989;Evers, Dannert, Rodding, Rotter, & Ringelstein, 1999;Hartje, Ringelstein, Kistinger, Fabianek, & Willmes, 1994;Kelley et al, 1992;Markus & Boland, 1992;Njemanze, 1991Njemanze, , 1996Njemanze, , 2002Njemanze, , 2004Njemanze, Gomez, & Horenstein, 1992;Rihs, Gutbrod, Steiger, Sturzenegger, & Mattle, 1995;Silvestrini, Troisi, Matteis, Razzano, & Caltagirone, 1994;Varnadore, Roberts, & McKinney, 1997;Vingerhoets & Stroobant, 1999). Studies with TCD have been cross-validated by functional MRI (Schmidt et al, 1999), and reproducibility assessed (Knecht et al, 1998).…”

Contributions to the Development of Objective Techniques for Presence Measurement in Virtual Environments by means of Brain Activity Analysis

“…As described before, each activation period (free navigation or automatic navigation) is preceded by a baseline period, and the BFV of each activation period can be compared with the BFV of the preceding baseline [206,207,20]. In order to compare the BFV variations observed in the automatic navigation condition (with respect to its preceding baseline) with the BFV variations observed in the free navigation condition (when compared to its preceding baseline), the percentage variation in BFV between the baseline and the activation period was calculated (4.1) [160,178,163,176,165].…”

“…• Several studies have proven that these variables do not significantly change while performing cognitive tasks in psychophysiological experiments [207,175,182].…”