Mental rotation performance has been found to produce one of the largest sex differences in cognition accompanied by sex differences in functional cerebral asymmetry. Although sex differences in mental rotation performance can be reliably demonstrated as early as age 5 years old, that is, long before puberty, no data exist as to whether…

Brain oscillatory correlates of spatial navigation were investigated using blind source separation (BSS) and standardized low resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) analyses of 62-channel EEG recordings. Twenty-five participants were instructed to navigate to distinct landmark buildings in a previously learned virtual reality town…

Few studies have investigated how aging influences the neural basis of implicit associative learning, and available evidence is inconclusive. One emerging behavioral pattern is that age differences increase with practice, perhaps reflecting the involvement of different brain regions with training. Many studies report hippocampal involvement early…

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,…

Previous studies suggested that primary somatosensory (SI) neurons in well-trained monkeys participated in the haptic-haptic unimodal delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task. In this study, 585 SI neurons were recorded in monkeys performing a task that was identical to that in the previous studies but without requiring discrimination and active…

Complex actions can be regarded as a concatenation of simple motor acts, arranged according to specific rules. Because the caudal part of the Broca's region (left Brodmann's area 44, BA 44) is involved in processing hierarchically organized behaviors, we aimed to test the hypothesis that this area may also play a role in learning structured motor…

The number reduction task (NRT) allows us to study the transition from implicit knowledge of hidden task regularities to explicit insight into these regularities. To identify sleep-associated neurophysiological indicators of this restructuring of knowledge representations, we measured frequency-specific power of EEG while participants slept during…

To understand the meanings of words and objects, we need to have knowledge about these items themselves plus executive mechanisms that compute and manipulate semantic information in a task-appropriate way. The neural basis for semantic control remains controversial. Neuroimaging studies have focused on the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus…

Selective processing of task-relevant stimuli is critical for goal-directed behavior. We used electrocorticography to assess the spatio-temporal dynamics of cortical activation during a simple phonological target detection task, in which subjects press a button when a prespecified target syllable sound is heard. Simultaneous surface potential…

Task representations consist of different aspects such as the representations of the relevant stimuli, the abstract rules to be applied, and the actions to be performed. To be flexible in our daily lives, we frequently need to switch between some or all aspects of a task. In the present study, we examined whether switching between abstract task…

Although much is known about decision making under uncertainty when only a single step is required in the decision process, less is known about sequential decision making. We carried out a stochastic sequence learning task in which subjects had to use noisy feedback to learn sequences of button presses. We compared flat and hierarchical behavioral…

The neural correlates of the encoding of associations between pairs of words, pairs of pictures, and word-picture pairs were compared. The aims were to determine, first, whether the neural correlates of associative encoding vary according to study material and, second, whether encoding of across- versus within-material item pairs is associated…

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has long been claimed to play a key role in language function. However, there is considerable controversy as to whether regions within LIFG have specific linguistic or domain-general functions. Using fMRI, we contrasted linguistic and task-related effects by presenting simple and morphologically complex words…

Interference from previously learned information, known as proactive interference (PI), limits our memory retrieval abilities. Previous studies of PI resolution have focused on the role of short-term familiarity, or recency, in causing PI. In the present study, we investigated the impact of long-term stimulus familiarity on PI resolution…

A growing number of studies show that visual mental imagery recruits the same brain areas as visual perception. Although the necessity of hV5/MT+ for motion perception has been revealed by means of TMS, its relevance for motion imagery remains unclear. We induced a direction-selective adaptation in hV5/MT+ by means of an MAE while subjects…