Eye movements can reflect memory. For example, participants make fewer fixations and sample fewer regions when viewing old versus new scenes (the repetition effect). It is unclear whether the repetition effect requires that participants have knowledge (awareness) of the old-new status of the scenes or if it can occur independent of knowledge about…

Prior lesion and functional imaging studies have highlighted the importance of the left ventral occipito-temporal (LvOT) cortex for visual word recognition. Within this area, there is a posterior-anterior hierarchy of subregions that are specialized for different stages of orthographic processing. The aim of the present fMRI study was to…

In the first installment of this series (Exceptional Parent Magazine, May 2010), the author discussed epilepsy surgery performed in persons whose areas of brain abnormality were initially deemed to be too extensive to safely perform a resection of the involved area. The process leading to surgical remediation for seizures is an involved one, but…

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 nucleus accumbens is critical for reward-guided learning and decision-making. It is thought to "gate" the flow of a diverse range of information (e.g., rewarding, aversive, and novel events) from limbic afferents to basal ganglia outputs. Gating and information encoding may be achieved via cross-frequency coupling, in which bursts of…

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…

Highly variable bisection performance in neglect patients has been attributed to an increased "zone of indifference" (Marshall & Halligan, 1989). The indifference zone indicates the discrepancy between two line lengths which are judged as equal in length. Following this argumentation, the central area of a line should be expanded in neglect…