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The ability to navigate in a familiar environment mainly relies on route knowledge, that is, a mental representation of relevant locations along a way, sequenced according to a navigational goal. Despite the clear ecological validity of this issue, route navigation and route knowledge have been scarcely investigated and little is known about the neural and cognitive bases of this navigational strategy...
Cognitive scientists typically classify cognitive processes as either controlled or automatic. Whereas controlled processes are slow and effortful, automatic processes are fast and involuntary. Over the past decade, we have propelled a research trajectory investigating how top-down influence in the form of suggestion can allow individuals to modulate the automaticity of cognitive processes. Here we...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and neuroimaging studies suggest a functional link between the emotion-related brain areas and the motor system. It is not well understood, however, whether the motor cortex activity is modulated by specific emotions experienced during music listening. In 23 healthy volunteers, we recorded the motor evoked potentials (MEP) following TMS to investigate the corticospinal...
Research on inhibitory motor control has implicated several prefrontal as well as subcortical and parietal regions in response inhibition. Whether prefrontal regions are critical for inhibition, attention or task-set representation is still under debate. We investigated the influence of the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) in a response inhibition task by using cognitive electrophysiology in prefrontal...
For individuals with vision-touch synaesthesia, the sight of touch on another person elicits synaesthetic tactile sensation on the observer’s own body. Here we used the traditional rubber hand paradigm (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) and a no-touch rubber hand paradigm to investigate and to authenticate synaesthetic tactile sensation. In the traditional rubber hand paradigm, the participant views a prosthetic...
Dopamine (DA) neurotransmission through D2 receptors (DRD2) has been implicated in the regulation of reward processing, cognition and the effects of drugs of abuse, and also has significant effects in responses to stressors and salient aversive stimuli. An examination of the influence of genetic variation across multiple psychophysical measures therefore appears critical to understand the neurobiology...
There is considerable evidence that long-term knowledge has an influence on short-term memory (STM) performance. This reflects the activation of long-term representations involved in perceiving and comprehending spoken language. Still, this type of long-term knowledge might be of two different kinds. STM performance might be facilitated by information about the meaning of the word, or, alternatively,...
Prominent deficits in spatial attention evident in patients with hemispatial neglect are often accompanied by equally prominent deficits in non-spatial attention (e.g., poor sustained and selective attention, pronounced vigilance decrement). A number of studies now show that deficits in non-spatial attention influence spatial attention. Treatment strategies focused on improving vigilance or sustained...
Both functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have shown that verbal working memory plays an important role during sentence processing. There is growing evidence from outside of sentence processing that human alpha oscillations (7–13 Hz) play a critical role in working memory. This study aims to link this to the sentence processing domain. Time-frequency...
The anticipation of highly aversive events is associated with measurable defensive activation, and both animal and human research suggests that stress-inducing contexts can facilitate memory. Here, we investigated whether encoding stimuli in the context of anticipating an aversive shock affects recognition memory. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured during a recognition test for words that...
Performance of voluntary behavior requires the selection of appropriate movements to attain a desired goal. We propose that the selection of voluntary movements is often contingent on the formation of a movement heuristic or set of internal rules governing movement selection. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify the electrophysiological correlates of the formation of movement heuristics...
Alexithymia, a sub-clinical personality construct associated with disturbances in affect regulation and social functioning, is known to be comorbid with a number of psychiatric conditions. We combined a distressing real-time altruism task with functional magnetic resonance imagining to explore the brain behaviour relationship between alexithymia and prosocial action. Here we show that individuals...
Data from neuropsychology and neuroimaging studies indicate hemispheric asymmetries in processing object's global form versus local parts. However the attentional mechanisms subtending visual selection of different levels of information are poorly understood. The classical left hemisphere/local–right hemisphere/global dichotomy has been recently challenged by studies linking the asymmetry of activation...
Individuals with no history of neurological or psychiatric illness can report hallucinatory Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and display elevated scores on measures of temporal-lobe dysfunction (Braithwaite et al., 2011). However, all previous investigations of such biases in non-clinical populations are based on indirect questionnaire measures. Here we present the first empirical investigation that...
Developmental stuttering (DS) is viewed as a motor speech-specific disorder, although several lines of research suggest that DS is a symptom of a broader motor disorder. We investigated corticospinal excitability in adult DS and normal speakers.Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was administered over left/right hand representation of the motor cortex while recording motor evoked potentials (MEPs)...
Systematic biases in spatial attention are a common finding. In the general population, a systematic leftward bias is typically observed (pseudoneglect), possibly as a consequence of right hemisphere dominance for visuospatial attention. However, this leftward bias can cross-over to a systematic rightward bias with changes in stimulus and state factors (such as line length and arousal). The processes...
Language proficiency should modulate the regions involved in language control in predictable ways during language switching. However, prior studies reveal inconsistent effects on the regions involved in language monitoring [pre-Supplementary Motor Area/Anterior Cingulate Cortex (pre-SMA/ACC)] and language selection (left caudate) conceivably because variations in relative proficiency are confounded...
Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) may be unaware of their cognitive impairment. The neuroanatomical mechanisms underlying this symptom, termed anosognosia or impaired self-awareness, are still poorly understood. In the present study we aimed to explore the functional correlates of self-awareness in patients with MCI and AD.Fifty-one participants (17 healthy...
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