Creativity is the ability to come up with new and original solutions to problems. It is characterized along a dipole spectrum, with the opposing ends defined as convergent and divergent thinking. Previous studies have provided evidence that various cognitive functions and insight into non-verbal problems can be enhanced using non-invasive brain…

This study examines whether deficits in visual information processing in autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) can be offset by the recruitment of brain structures involved in selective attention. During functional MRI, 12 children with ASD and 19 control participants completed a selective attention one-back task in which images of faces and houses were…

In the present experiment, we used search asymmetry to test whether the sustained attention to response task is a better measure of response inhibition or sustained attention. Participants performed feature present and feature absent target detection tasks using either a sustained attention to response task (SART; high Go low No-Go) or a…

Speakers often include extra information when producing referring expressions, which is inconsistent with the Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). In this study, we investigated how comprehension is affected by unnecessary information. The literature is mixed: some studies have found that extra information facilitates comprehension and others reported…

In order to determine the processing stage that is responsible for the effect of mood states on the breadth of attentional focus, we recorded event-related potentials from 18 students who performed a flanker task involving adjacent letters. To induce a specific mood state, positive, neutral, or negative affective pictures were presented repeatedly…

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene…

When healthy individuals are presented with peripheral figures in which small letters are arranged to form a large letter, they are faster to identify the global- than the local-level information, and have difficulty ignoring global information when identifying the local level. The global reaction time (RT) advantage and global interference effect…

Reaction time (RT) and event-related potential (ERP) measures were used to examine the relationships between psychopathic symptoms and three major attention networks (alerting, orienting, and executive attention) among a community sample of youth. Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD; Frick and Hare 2001) total and subscale scores were…

Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) involve a core deficit in social functioning and impairments in the ability to recognize face emotions. In an emotional faces task designed to constrain group differences in attention, the present study used functional MRI to characterize activation in the amygdala, ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC), and…

Temporal preparation and impulsivity involve overlapping neural structures (prefrontal cortex) and cognitive functions (response inhibition and time perception), however, their interrelations had not been investigated. We studied such interrelations by comparing the performance of groups with low vs. high non-clinical trait impulsivity during a…

Within the parietal cortex, the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) seem to be involved in both spatial and nonspatial functions: Both areas are activated when misleading information is provided by invalid spatial cues in Posner's location-cueing paradigm, but also when infrequent deviant stimuli are presented within…

Evidence exists that both right and left hemisphere attentional mechanisms are mobilized when attention is directed to the right visual hemifield and only right hemisphere attentional mechanisms are mobilized when attention is directed to the left visual hemifield. This arrangement might lead to a rightward bias of automatic attention. The…

Cognitive performance is affected by an individual's characteristics and the environment, as well as by the nature of the task and the amount of practice at it. Mental performance tests range in complexity and include subjective estimates of mood, simple objective tests (reaction time), and measures of complex performance that require decisions to…

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and healthy controls were administered a flanker task that consisted of the presentation of colored targets and distractors. Participants were required to attend to the center target and identify its color. The stimulus displays were either congruent (i.e., the target and flankers were the same color) or…

Recent findings suggest a right hemispheric dominance in gaze-triggered shifts of attention. The aim of this study was to clarify the dominant hemisphere in the gaze processing that mediates attentional shift. A target localization task, with preceding non-predicative gaze cues presented to each visual field, was undertaken by 44 healthy subjects,…