This is the first study to investigate the effects of test methods (while-listening performance and post-listening performance) and gender on measured listening ability and brain activation under test conditions. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to examine three brain regions associated with listening comprehension: the…

The present study aimed to explore the neural-related mechanism of the creative evaluation process in individual with different levels of creativity. The time course of evaluation process for creative objects was monitored by event-related potentials (EPRs). Forty-five participants were divided into the high-creativity performance (HCP) group and…

Research suggests that speech-accompanying gestures influence cognitive processes, but it is not clear whether the gestural benefit is specific to the gesturing hand. Two experiments tested the "(right/left) hand-specificity" hypothesis for self-oriented functions of gestures: gestures with a particular hand enhance cognitive processes…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

Fluctuating sex hormone levels during the menstrual cycle have been shown to affect functional cerebral asymmetries in cognitive domains. These effects seem to result from the neuromodulatory properties of sex hormones and their metabolites on interhemispheric processing. The present study was carried out to investigate whether functional cerebral…

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 concept of brain hemisphere dominance serves as the basis for many educational learning theories. The dominant brain hemisphere guides the learning process, but both hemispheres are necessary for true learning to take place. This treatise outlines and analyzes the dominance factor, a learning theory developed by Dr. Carla Hannaford, which…

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…

The existence of handedness differences in the retrieval of episodic memories is well-documented, but virtually all have been obtained under conditions of intentional learning. Two experiments are reported that extend the presence of such handedness differences to memory retrieval under conditions of incidental learning. Experiment 1 used Craik…

Retrieval of memories is enhanced when bilateral saccades are made immediately before attempting retrieval. One hypothesis is that saccades enhance retrieval by increasing interaction of the brain hemispheres. To test this, subjects viewed arrays of lateralized letters and indicated whether target letters matched either of two probe letters.…

The effects of handedness and saccadic bilateral eye movements on autobiographical recollection were investigated. Recall of autobiographical memories was cued by the use of neutral and emotional words. Autobiographical recollection was assessed by the autobiographical memory questionnaire. Experiment 1 found that mixed-handed (vs. right handed)…

The aim of this study was to determine the influence of sex on hemispheric asymmetry and cooperation in a face recognition task. We used a masked priming paradigm in which the prime stimulus was centrally presented; it could be a bisymmetric face or a hemi-face in which facial information was presented in the left or the right visual field and…

Brain lateralization refers to the division of labour between the two hemispheres in controlling a wide array of functions and is remarkably well developed in humans. Based on sex differences in lateralization of handedness and language, several hypotheses have postulated an effect of prenatal exposure to testosterone on human lateralization…

The functional neuroanatomy of tasks that recruit different forms of response selection and inhibition has to our knowledge, never been directly addressed in a single fMRI study using similar stimulus-response paradigms where differences between scanning time and sequence, stimuli, and experimenter instructions were minimized. Twelve right-handed…

The relationship between consistency of hand preference, left hemispheric specialization, and cognitive functioning was examined in an ongoing longitudinal investigation. Children were classified as consistent or inconsistent in their hand preference across 5 assessments from ages 18 to 42 months. Findings demonstrated that (a) this early…