Multichannel EEG traces from healthy subjects are used to investigate the brain's self-organisation tendencies during two different mental arithmetic tasks. By making a comparison with a control-state in the form of a classification problem, we can detect and quantify the changes in coordinated brain activity in terms of functional connectivity.…

Category training can induce category effects, whereby color discrimination of stimuli spanning a newly learned category boundary is enhanced relative to equivalently spaced stimuli from within the newly learned category (e.g., categorical perception). However, the underlying mechanisms of these acquired category effects are not fully understood.…

Creativity has emerged in the focus of neurocognitive research in the past decade. However, a heterogeneous pattern of brain areas has been implicated as underpinning the neural correlates of creativity. One explanation for these divergent findings lies in the fact that creativity is not usually investigated in terms of its many underlying…

Participants made categorical or coordinate spatial judgments on the global or local elements of shapes. Stimuli were composed of a horizontal line and two dots. In the Categorical task, participants judged whether the line was above or below the dots. In the Coordinate task, they judged whether the line would fit between the dots. Stimuli were…

Efficient processing of unfamiliar faces typically involves their categorization (e.g., into old vs. young or male vs. female). However, age and gender categorization may pose different perceptual demands. In the present study, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the activity evoked during age vs. gender…

Although functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) affect all cognitive domains, their modulation of the efficacy of specific executive functions is largely unexplored. In the present study, we used a lateralized version of the task switching paradigm to investigate the relevance of hemispheric asymmetries for cognitive control processes. Words were…

The remediation of executive function in patients with schizophrenia is important in rehabilitation because these skills affect the patient's capacity to function in the community. There is evidence that instructional techniques can improve deficits in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) in some schizophrenia patients. We used a standard…

Throughout middle-childhood, inhibitory processes, which underlie many higher order cognitive tasks, are developing. Little is known about how inhibitory processes change as a task becomes conceptually more difficult during these important years. In adults, as Go/NoGo tasks become more difficult there is a systematic decrease in the P3 NoGo…

Limb apraxia is a neurological disorder characterized by an inability to pantomime and/or imitate gestures. It is more commonly observed after left hemisphere damage (LHD), but has also been reported after right hemisphere damage (RHD). The Conceptual-Production Systems model (Roy, 1996) suggests that three systems are involved in the control of…

Participants performed two object-matching tasks for novel, non-nameable objects consisting of geons. For each original stimulus, two transformations were applied to create comparison stimuli. In the categorical transformation, a geon connected to geon A was moved to geon B. In the coordinate transformation, a geon connected to geon A was moved to…

In this paper, we aimed to verify the emotional facilitation effect in the picture-word interference task using event-related potentials. Twenty-one healthy subjects were asked to categorize the emotional valences of pictures accompanied by emotionally congruent, either centrally or laterally positioned Chinese words. For both the foveal and…

Recent research has looked at whether the expectancy of an emotion can account for subsequent valence specific laterality effects of prosodic emotion, though no research has examined this effect for facial emotion. In the study here (n = 58), we investigated this issue using two tasks; an emotional face perception task and a novel word task that…

We investigated the effects of increased inter-hemispheric interaction (IHI) on five creativity dimensions (appropriateness, detail, categorical distinctiveness, fluency, and originality) of the Alternate Uses Task. Two methods were used to indicate degree of IHI. Trait IHI was indicated by individual differences in handedness, mixed-handers…

Some people report that they consistently and involuntarily associate time events, such as months of the year, with specific spatial locations; a condition referred to as time-space synesthesia. The present study investigated the manner in which such synesthetic time-space associations affect visuo-spatial attention via an endogenous cuing…

In daily activities, humans must attend and respond to a range of important items and inhibit and not respond to unimportant distractions. Our current understanding of these processes is largely based on perceptually simple stimuli. This study investigates the interaction of conceptual-semantic categorization and inhibitory processing using Event…