Background: Until today, there is no satisfying explanation for why one language may recover worse than another in differential bilingual aphasia. One potential explanation that has been largely unexplored is that differential aphasia is the consequence of a loss of language control rather than a loss of linguistic representations. Language…

The entorhinal-hippocampal circuit is one of the earliest sites of cortical pathology in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Visuospatial memory paradigms that are mediated by the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit may offer a means to detect memory impairment during the early stages of AD. In this study, we developed a 4-min visuospatial memory paradigm called…

Purpose: An impoverished production of routinized expressions, namely, formulaic language, has been reported for monolingual speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Little is known regarding how formulaic expressions might be manifested in individuals with neurological damage who speak more than one language. This study investigated the processing…

In this study we sought to determine the effect of daily sucrose consumption in young rats on their subsequent performance in tasks that involve the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. High levels of sugar consumption have been associated with the development of obesity, however less is known about how sugar consumption influences behavioral…

The present study aimed to investigate the slow negative potential (termed Decision Preceding Negativity, DPN, from the family of the Readiness Potential) which precedes a willed risky decision. To this end, evoked potentials preceding and following an economic choice were measured in a sample of 16 male students during the Iowa Gambling Task…

Studies investigating reading and spelling difficulties heavily focused on the neural correlates of reading impairments, whereas spelling impairments have been largely neglected so far. Hence, the aim of the present study was to investigate brain structure and function of children with isolated spelling difficulties. Therefore, 31 children, aged…

Decision-making involves the ability to choose between competing actions that are associated with uncertain benefits and penalties. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), which mimics real-life decision-making, involves learning a reward-punishment rule over multiple trials. Patients with damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) show deficits…

There is consensus that the left hemisphere plays a dominant role in language processing, but functional imaging studies have shown that the right as well as the left posterior inferior frontal gyri (pIFG) are activated when healthy right-handed individuals make phonological word decisions. Here we used online transcranial magnetic stimulation…

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and insular cortex are implicated in distributed neural circuitry that supports emotional decision-making. Previous studies of patients with vmPFC lesions have focused primarily on decision-making under uncertainty, when outcome probabilities are ambiguous (e.g. the Iowa Gambling Task). It remains unclear…

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a critical role in stimulus-reinforcement learning and reward-guided selection of actions. Here we conducted a series of experiments to further elucidate the role of the ACC in instrumental behavior involving effort-based decision-making and instrumental learning guided by reward-predictive stimuli. In…