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…

High sugar diets reduce hippocampal neurogenesis, which is required for minimizing interference between memories, a process that involves "pattern separation." We provided rats with 2 h daily access to a sucrose solution for 28 d and assessed their performance on a spatial memory task. Sucrose consuming rats discriminated between objects…

Clinical evidence has shown that physical exercise during pregnancy may alter brain development and improve cognitive function of offspring. However, the mechanisms through which maternal exercise might promote such effects are not well understood. The present study examined levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and absolute cell…

Individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show hallmark deficits in social perception. These difficulties might also reflect fundamental deficits in integrating visual signals. We contrasted predictions of a social perception and a spatial-temporal integration deficit account. Participants with ASD and matched controls performed two…

Impaired tool related action in ideomotor apraxia is normally ascribed to loss of sensorimotor memories for habitual actions (engrams), but this account has not been tested against a hypothesis of a general deficit in representation of hand-object spatial relationships. Rapid reaching for familiar tools was compared with reaching for abstract…

In this experiment we studied statistical learning, inter-trial priming, and visual attention. We assessed healthy controls and right brain damaged (RBD) patients with and without neglect, on a simple visual discrimination task designed to measure priming effects and probability learning. All participants showed a preserved priming effect for item…

Despite their lack of vision, congenitally blind subjects are able to build and manipulate cognitive maps for spatial navigation. It is assumed that they thereby rely more heavily on echolocation, proprioceptive signals and environmental cues such as ambient temperature and audition to compensate for their lack of vision. Little is known, however,…

The capacity to learn new visuomotor associations is fundamental to adaptive motor behavior. Evidence suggests visuomotor learning deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the exact nature of these deficits and the ability of dopamine medication to improve them are under-explored. Previous studies suggested that learning driven by large and…

Although previous findings point to the long-term impact of ethanol exposure during periadolescence on hippocampal-dependent learning tasks, comparisons considering different onset and exposure periods during this developmental range of ages are still needed. The aim of this experiment was to determine whether intermittent voluntary chronic…

Human observers use prior constraints to disambiguate a scene; in particular, light is preferentially seen as coming from above but also slightly from the left. One explanation of this lateral bias could be a cerebral hemispheric difference. The aim of the present study was to determine the preferred light source position for neglect patients. For…

One of the most common and serious co-morbidities in patients with epilepsy is cognitive impairment. While early-life seizures are considered a major cause for cognitive impairment, it is not known whether it is the seizures, the underlying neurological substrate or a combination that has the largest impact on eventual learning and memory. Teasing…

We studied the role of the frontal lobes in orienting spatial attention and inhibiting attentional capture by goal-irrelevant stimuli, using a spatial cueing method in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Two blocks of trials were presented, one with non-predictive cues and the other with counter-predictive cues. FTD patients showed a…

Patients with right hemisphere lesions often omit or misread words on the left side of a text or the beginning letters of single words which is termed neglect dyslexia (ND). Two types of reading errors are typically observed in ND: omissions and word-based reading errors. The prior are considered as space-based omission errors on the…

Some people report that they consistently and involuntarily associate time events, such as months of the year, with specific spatial locations; a condition referred to as time-space synesthesia. The present study investigated the manner in which such synesthetic time-space associations affect visuo-spatial attention via an endogenous cuing…

The current study examined the contribution of brain areas affected by Parkinson's disease (PD) to sequence learning, with a specific focus on response-related processes, spatial attentional control, and executive functioning. Patients with mild PD, patients with moderate PD, and healthy age-matched participants performed three tasks--a sequence…