Humans have an unparalleled ability to represent objects as members of multiple categories. A given object, such as a pillow may be--depending on current task demands--represented as an instance of something that is soft, as something that contains feathers, as something that is found in bedrooms, or something that is larger than a toaster. This…

Several psychophysical and neuropsychological investigations have suggested that the mental representation of numbers takes the form of a number line along which magnitude is positioned in ascending order according to our reading habits. A longstanding debate is whether this spatial frame is triggered automatically as intrinsic part of the number…

The ability to represent desires and intentions as two distinct mental states was investigated in patients with parietal (N = 8) and frontal (N = 6) lesions and in age-matched controls (N = 7). A task was used where the satisfaction of the desire and the fulfilment of the intention did not co-vary and were manipulated in a 2 x 2 set. In two…

Are all categories of objects recognized in the same manner visually? Evidence from neuropsychology suggests they are not: some brain damaged patients are more impaired in recognizing natural objects than artefacts whereas others show the opposite impairment. Category-effects have also been demonstrated in neurologically intact subjects, but the…

Current models in social neuroscience advance that eye contact may automatically recruit cognitive resources. Here, we directly tested this hypothesis by evaluating the distracting strength of eye contact on concurrent visual processing in the well-known Stroop's paradigm. As expected, participants showed stronger Stroop interference under…

Neurocognitive theories of anxiety predict that threat-related information can be evaluated before attentional selection, and can influence behaviour differentially in high anxious compared to low anxious individuals. We investigate this further by presenting emotional and neutral faces in an adapted binocular rivalry paradigm. We show that the…

Brain images are believed to have a particularly persuasive influence on the public perception of research on cognition. Three experiments are reported showing that presenting brain images with articles summarizing cognitive neuroscience research resulted in higher ratings of scientific reasoning for arguments made in those articles, as compared…

Grapheme-color synesthesia, when achromatic digits evoke an experience of a specific color (photisms), has been shown to be consistent, involuntary, and linked with number concept in adults, yet there have been no comparable investigations with children. We present a systematic study of grapheme-color synesthesia in children aged between 7 and 15…

The language production system of literate adults comprises an orthographic system (used during written language production) and a phonological system (used during spoken language production). Recent psycholinguistic research has investigated possible influences of the orthographic system on the phonological system. This research has produced…

In this paper, I am going to examine the disorder of psychopathy and consider how genetic anomalies could give rise to the relatively specific neuro-cognitive impairments seen in individuals with this disorder. I will argue that genetic anomalies in psychopathy reduce the salience of punishment information (perhaps as a function of noradrenergic…

Functional neuroimaging research has shown that certain classes of visual stimulus selectively activate focal regions of visual cortex. Specifically, cortical areas that generally and selectively respond to faces (Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. M. (1997). The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face…

Assessed whether performances of 5- and 6-year olds in arithmetic tests can be predicted from their performances in neuropsychological tests. Participants completed neuropsychological, drawing, and arithmetic tests at 5 and 6 years of age. Findings at older age were correctly assumed by conclusions of first evaluation. (LBT)

Despite intensive work on language-brain relations, and a fairly impressive accumulation of knowledge over the last several decades, there has been little progress in developing large-scale models of the functional anatomy of language that integrate neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and psycholinguistic data. Drawing on relatively recent…