Most experimental preparations demonstrate a role for dorsolateral striatum (DLS) in stimulus-response, but not outcome-based, learning. Here, we assessed DLS involvement in a touchscreen-based reversal task requiring mice to update choice following a change in stimulus-reward contingencies. In vivo single-unit recordings in the DLS showed…

People associate numbers and horizontal space. This association has been demonstrated by the so-called SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes)-effect, with Western participants responding faster to larger numbers with their right hand and vice versa for smaller numbers. SNARC-like effects have also been reported for preschoolers.…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to influence language skills, with children of lower SES backgrounds performing worse on language assessments compared to their higher SES peers. While there is abundant behavioral research on the effects of SES, whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms used to support language skill is less…

Some situations require one to quickly stop an initiated response. Recent evidence suggests that rapid stopping engages a mechanism that has diffuse effects on the motor system. For example, stopping the hand dampens the excitability of the task-irrelevant leg. However, it is unclear whether this "global suppression" could apply across wider motor…

Bowler et al. ("Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders" 44(9):2355-2362. doi:10.1007/s10803-014-2105-y, 2014) have suggested that a specific memory impairment in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) arises from hippocampal failure to consolidate multiple related pieces of information. Twenty-four adults diagnosed with ASD and matched…

Planning and executing volitional actions in the face of conflicting habitual responses is a critical aspect of human behavior. At the core of the interplay between these 2 control systems lies an override mechanism that can suppress the habitual action selection process and allow executive control to take over. Here, we construct a neural circuit…

Functional neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing have been interpreted as identifying the neural locations of parsing and interpretive operations. However, current behavioral studies of sentence processing indicate that many operations occur simultaneously with parsing and interpretation. In this review, we point to issues that arise in…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are assessments of how well materials have been learned. Although a wide body of literature has demonstrated a reliable correlation between memory performance and JOLs, relatively little is known about the nature of this link. Here, we investigate the relationship between JOLs and the memory retrieval processes engaged…

Emotionally arousing information is treated in a specialised manner across a number of different processing stages, and memory for affective events is often found to be heightened by virtue of this. However, in some cases, emotional experiences might be the very ones that we would like to forget. Here, two item-method directed forgetting studies…

Mathematical skills are becoming increasingly critical for achieving academic and professional success. Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a childhood-onset disorder characterized by the presence of abnormalities in the acquisition of arithmetic skills affecting approximately 5% of school age children. Diagnosing students with possible dyscalculia…

Neuropsychological and functional imaging studies have associated the conceptual processing of numbers with bilateral parietal regions (including intraparietal sulcus). However, the processes driving these effects remain unclear because both left and right posterior parietal regions are activated by many other conceptual, perceptual, attention,…

Keeping aware of the locations of objects while one is moving requires the updating of spatial representations. As long as the objects are visible, attentional tracking is sufficient, but knowing where objects out of view went in relation to one's own body involves an updating of spatial working memory. Here, multiple object tracking was employed…

A growing body of evidence suggests that semantic access is obligatory. Several studies have demonstrated that brain activity associated with semantic processing, measured in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), is elicited even by meaningless, orthographically illegal strings, suggesting that semantic access is not gated…

Individuals scoring high in fluid intelligence tasks generally perform very efficiently in problem solving tasks and analogical reasoning tasks presumably because they are able to select the task-relevant information very quickly and focus on a limited set of task-relevant cognitive operations. Moreover, individuals with high fluid intelligence…

The present study examined a visual field asymmetry in the contingent capture of attention that was previously observed by Du and Abrams (2010). In our first experiment, color singleton distractors that matched the color of a to-be-detected target produced a stronger capture of attention when they appeared in the left visual hemifield than in the…