Past research at the nexus of motor control and perception investigated the role of perspective taking in many behavioral and neuroimaging studies. Some investigators addressed the issue of one's own vs. others' action imagination, but the possible effects of a front or a back view in imagining others' actions have so far been neglected. We report…

Despite the fact that hemispheric asymmetry of attention has been widely studied, a clear picture of this complex phenomenon is still lacking. The aim of the present study was to provide an efficient and reliable measurement of potential hemispheric asymmetries of three attentional networks, i.e. alerting, orienting and executive attention.…

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed foveally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word…

A number of human brain areas showing a larger response to faces than to objects from different categories, or to scrambled faces, have been identified in neuroimaging studies. Depending on the statistical criteria used, the set of areas can be overextended or minimized, both at the local (size of areas) and global (number of areas) levels. Here…

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were…

Accuracy for a second target (T2) is reduced when it is presented within 500 ms of a first target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)--an attentional blink (AB). There are reliable individual differences in the magnitude of the AB. Recent evidence has shown that the attentional approach that an individual typically adopts during a…

Based on the theoretical analysis of self-consciousness concepts, we hypothesized that the spatio-temporal pattern of functional connectivity within the default-mode network (DMN) should persist unchanged across a variety of different cognitive tasks or acts, thus being task-unrelated. This supposition is in contrast with current understanding…

It is well known that sensorimotor memories are built and updated through experience with objects. These representations are useful to anticipatory and feedforward control processes that preset grip and load forces during lifting. When individuals lift objects with qualities that are not congruent with their memory-derived expectations, feedback…

The time taken to decide whether a character is shown in its mirror or normal version has been shown to increase approximately linearly with the angular departure from an up-right position. Additionally, in some studies, decisions took longer for clockwise tilted characters than for counterclockwise tilted ones. Other studies do not report the…

The Tower of London (TOL) task has been widely used in both clinical and research realms. In the current study, 104 healthy participants attempted all possible moderate- to high-difficulty TOL problems in order to determine: (1) optimal measures of problem solving performance, (2) problem characteristics, other than the minimum moves necessary to…

Poor performance on the antisaccade task has been proposed as a candidate endophenotype in schizophrenia. Caveats to this proposal, however, include inconsistent findings in first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia, and substantial heterogeneity in individuals with the disorder. In this study, we examined antisaccade performance in…

This review provides a description of the measurement methods, task definitions and measurement parameters in the study of smooth eye pursuit and saccade-antisaccade tasks in psychiatry. The large heterogeneity in task definitions and definitions of parameters and its potential impact on the large variability of the parameter measures is…

The representation of time and space are closely linked in the cognitive system. Optokinetic stimulation modulates spatial attention in healthy subjects and patients with spatial neglect. In order to evaluate whether optokinetic stimulation could influence time perception, a group of healthy subjects performed "time-comparison" tasks of sub- and…