Balancing habitual and deliberate forms of choice entails a comparison of their respective merits--the former being faster but inflexible, and the latter slower but more versatile. Here, we show that arbitration between these two forms of control can be derived from first principles within an Active Inference scheme. We illustrate our arguments…

Creativity has emerged in the focus of neurocognitive research in the past decade. However, a heterogeneous pattern of brain areas has been implicated as underpinning the neural correlates of creativity. One explanation for these divergent findings lies in the fact that creativity is not usually investigated in terms of its many underlying…

Language production has been found to be lateralized in the left hemisphere (LH) for 95% of right-handed people and about 75% of left-handers. The prevalence of atypical right hemispheric (RH) or bilateral lateralization for reading and colateralization of production with word reading laterality has never been tested in a large sample. In this…

Most existing models of dopamine and learning in Parkinson disease (PD) focus on simulating the role of basal ganglia dopamine in reinforcement learning. Much data argue, however, for a critical role for prefrontal cortex (PFC) dopamine in stimulus selection in attentional learning. Here, we present a new computational model that simulates…

Non-visual gaze patterns (NVGPs) involve saccades and fixations that spontaneously occur in cognitive activities that are not ostensibly visual. While reasons for their appearance remain obscure, convergent empirical evidence suggests that NVGPs change according to processing requirements of tasks. We examined NVGPs in tasks with long-term memory…

Recent studies have used spatial reorientation task paradigms to identify underlying cognitive mechanisms of navigation in children, adults, and a range of animal species. Despite broad interest in this task across disciplines, little is known about the brain bases of reorientation. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine neural…

Mammillary body atrophy is present in a number of neurological conditions and recent clinical findings highlight the importance of these nuclei for memory. While most accounts of diencephalic amnesia emphasize the functional importance of the hippocampal projections to the mammillary bodies, the present study tested the importance of the other…

An enduring enterprise of experimental psychology has been to account for individual differences in human performance. Recent advances in neuroimaging have permitted testing of hypotheses regarding the neural bases of individual differences but this burgeoning literature has been characterized by inconsistent results. We argue that careful design…

Recent psychological and neuropsychological research suggests that executive functions--the cognitive control processes that regulate thought and action--are multifaceted and that different types of executive functions are correlated but separable. The present multivariate twin study of 3 executive functions (inhibiting dominant responses,…

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the role of phonological processing by utilizing nonword rhyming decision tasks (e.g., Pugh et al., 1996). Although such tasks clearly engage phonological components of visual word recognition, it is clear that decision tasks are more cognitively involved than the…

Recent studies have attempted to understand the processes involved in joint attention because of its relevance to both atypical and normal development. Data from a recent study of young children with autism suggests that performance on a delay nonmatch to sample (DNMS) task associated with ventromedial prefrontal functions, but not an…