Linguistic categories can impact visual perception. For instance, learning that two objects have different names can enhance their discriminability. Previous studies have identified a typical pattern of categorical perception, characterized by faster discrimination of stimuli from different categories, a neural mismatch response during early…

The hippocampus has long been recognized as important for the formation of long-term memory. Recent work has suggested that the hippocampus might also be important for certain kinds of spatial operations, as in constructing scenes, shifting perspective, or perceiving the geometry of scenes and their boundaries. We explored this proposal using a…

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…

The testing effect, defined as the positive effect of "retrieval practice" (i.e., self-testing) on long-term memory retention relative to other ways to support learning, is a robust empirical phenomenon. Despite substantial scientific evidence for the testing effect, less is known about its effectiveness in relation to individual…

Speech, reading, and writing are the basic forms of linguistic communication. Therefore, it is very important to diagnose any problems with them as early and completely as possible, particularly in children with special needs. One of the methods that focuses primarily on the diagnosis and therapy of such learning difficulties is the one developed…

A group of 50 good readers and a group of 50 poor readers of Grade 5 matched for age and intelligence and selected on the basis of their proficiency in reading comprehension were tested for their competence in word reading and the process of planning at three different levels, namely, perceptual, memory and conceptual in order to study the…

We investigated the consequences of premature birth on the functional neuroanatomy of the dorsal stream of visual processing. fMRI was recorded while sixteen healthy participants, 8 (two men) adults (19 years 6 months old, SD 10 months) born premature (mean gestational age 30 weeks), referred to as Premas, and 8 (two men) matched controls (20…

Diminished episodic memory and diminished use of semantic information to aid recall by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both thought to result from diminished relational binding of elements of complex stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we asked high-functioning adults with ASD and typical comparison participants to study grids in…

Visual STM (VSTM) is thought to be related to visual attention in several ways. Attention controls access to VSTM during memory encoding and plays a role in the maintenance of stored information by strengthening memorized content. We investigated the involvement of visual attention in recall from VSTM. In two experiments, we measured…

Report of a second target (T2) is impaired when presented within 500 ms of the first (T1). This attentional blink (AB) is known to cause a delay in T2 processing during which T2 must be stored in a labile memory buffer. We explored the buffer's characteristics using different types of masks after T2. These characteristics were inferred by…

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…

Semantic memory was investigated in a patient (MR) affected by a severe apperceptive visual agnosia, due to an ischemic cerebral lesion, bilaterally affecting the infero-mesial parts of the temporo-occipital cortices. The study was made by means of a Semantic Knowledge Questionnaire (Laiacona, Barbarotto, Trivelli, & Capitani, 1993), which takes…

In the current study, we explored the influence of synesthesia on memory for word lists. We tested 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who reported an experience of color when reading letters or words. We replicated a previous finding that memory is compromised when synesthetic color is incongruent with perceptual color. Beyond this, we found that,…

Many current theories of false memories propose that, when we retrieve a memory, we are not reactivating a veridical, fixed representation of a past event, but are rather reactivating incomplete fragments that may be accurate or distorted and may have arisen from other events. By presenting the two phases of the misinformation paradigm in…

Remembering the past and envisioning the future rely on episodic memory which enables mental time travel. Studies in young adults indicate that past and future thinking share common cognitive and neural underpinnings. No imaging data is yet available in healthy aged subjects. Using fMRI, we scanned older subjects while they remembered personal…