An important question regards how we use environmental boundaries to anchor spatial representations during navigation. Behavioral and neurophysiological models appear to provide conflicting predictions, and this question has been difficult to answer because of technical challenges with testing navigation in novel, large-scale, realistic spatial…

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…

We apply a biopsychosocial conceptualization to attention development in the 1st year and examine the role of neurophysiological and social processes on the development of early attention processes. We tested whether maternal behavior measured during 2 mother-child interaction tasks when infants (N = 388) were 5 months predicted infant medial…

Selective attention in the presence of distraction is a key aspect of healthy cognition. The underlying neurobiological processes, have not, however, been functionally well characterized. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine how ecologically relevant distracting noise affects cortical activity in 27…

Recent brain imaging investigations of developmental stuttering show considerable disagreement regarding which regions are related to stuttering. These divergent findings have been mainly derived from group studies. To investigate functional neurophysiology with improved precision, an individual-participant approach (N = 4) using event-related…

This systematic review aimed to establish the current knowledge about brain structure and executive function (EF) in children with cerebral palsy (CP). Five databases were searched (up till July 2012). Six articles met the inclusion criteria, all included structural brain imaging though no functional brain imaging. Study quality was assessed using…

Although functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) affect all cognitive domains, their modulation of the efficacy of specific executive functions is largely unexplored. In the present study, we used a lateralized version of the task switching paradigm to investigate the relevance of hemispheric asymmetries for cognitive control processes. Words were…

Functional Transcranial Doppler sonography (fTCD) has been applied to assess peak mean cerebral blood flow velocity (MFV) with a high temporal resolution during cognitive activation. Yet, little attention has been devoted to gender-related alterations of MFV, including spectral analysis. In healthy subjects, fTCD was used to investigate a series…

The geometry formed by the walls of a room is known to be a potent cue in reorientation, yet little is known about the use of geometric information gleaned from other contexts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine neural activity in adults while reorienting in 3 different environments: the typical rectangular walled room, a…

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…

The immediate and long-term neural correlates of linguistic processing deficits reported following paediatric and adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) are poorly understood. Therefore, the current research investigated event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a semantic picture-word priming experiment in two groups of highly functioning…

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…

Brain imaging studies provide strong evidence for the involvement of the human mirror system during the observation of complex movements, depending on the individual's motor expertise. Here, we ask the question whether motor expertise not only affects perception while observing movements, but also benefits perception while solving mental rotation…

Oral reading is a complex skill involving the interaction of orthographic, phonological, and semantic processes. Functional imaging studies with nonimpaired adult readers have identified a widely distributed network of frontal, inferior parietal, posterior temporal, and occipital brain regions involved in the task. However, while functional…

The left inferior frontal cortex, the caudate and the anterior cingulate have been proposed as the neural origin of language switching, but most of the studies were conducted in low proficient bilinguals. In the present study, we investigated brain areas involved in language switching in a sample of 19 early, high-proficient Spanish-Catalan…