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…

Adaptive behaviors require preparation and when necessary inhibition or alteration of actions. The right hemisphere has been posited to be dominant for preparatory motor activation. This experiment was designed to learn if there are hemispheric asymmetries in the control of altered plans of actions. Cues, both valid and invalid, which indicate the…

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal…

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is one of the most frequent neuropsychiatric disorders in childhood. Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies based on muscle responses (motor-evoked potentials) suggested that reduced motor inhibition contributes to hyperactivity, a core symptom of the disease. Here we employed the N100 component of the…

We studied error monitoring in a human patient with unique implantation of depth electrodes in both the left dorsal cingulate gyrus and medial temporal lobe prior to surgery. The patient performed a speeded go/nogo task and made a substantial number of commission errors (false alarms). As predicted, intracranial Local Field Potentials (iLFPs) in…

Sleep supports the consolidation of declarative and procedural memory. While prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity supports the consolidation of declarative memory during sleep, opposite effects of PFC activity are reported with respect to the consolidation of procedural memory during sleep. Patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)…

We investigated whether motor planning problems in people with Hemiparetic Cerebral Palsy (HCP) are paralleled by impaired ability to use Motor Imagery (MI). While some studies have shown that individuals with HCP can solve a mental rotation task, it was not clear if they used MI or Visual Imagery (VI). In the present study, motor planning and MI…

Studies of inhibitory control have focused on inhibition of motor responses. Individuals with ADHD consistently show reductions in inhibitory control and exhibit reduced activity of rLPFC activity compared to controls when performing such tasks. Recently these same brain regions have been implicated in the inhibition of memory retrieval. The…

Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the hand area of the left primary motor cortex or, as a control, to the vertex (STIMULATION: TMS[subscript M1] vs. TMS[subscript vertex]) while right-handed volunteers silently read verbs related to hand actions. We examined three different tasks and time points for stimulation…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the mechanisms of brain activity, as revealed by a combination of the visuospatial attention shifting paradigm and event-related potentials (ERP) in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and typically developing children. Twenty-eight DCD children and 26 typically…

This study sought to identify patterns of impaired acoustic laryngeal reaction time as a function of response complexity parallel to metabolic measures of brain function. Findings indicated that the disruption in speech motor control for 16 adult male developmental stutterers was systematically related to metabolic asymmetry in left superior and…