Adult neuroimaging studies have demonstrated dissociable neural activation patterns in the visual cortex in response to letters (Latin alphabet) and numbers (Arabic numerals), which suggest a strong experiential influence of reading and mathematics on the human visual system. Here, developmental trajectories in the event-related potential (ERP)…

Humans are born with the ability to mentally represent the approximate numerosity of a set of objects, but little is known about the brain systems that sub-serve this ability early in life and their relation to the brain systems underlying symbolic number and mathematics later in development. Here we investigate processing of numerical magnitudes…

Fluency is used as an indicator of reading proficiency. Many students with reading disabilities are unable to benefit from typical interventions. This study is designed to replicate Lorusso, Facoetti, Paganoni, Pezzani, and Molteni's (2006) work using FlashWord, a computer program that tachistoscopically presents words in the right or left visual…

The SERIOL model of orthographic analysis proposed mechanisms for converting visual input into a serial encoding of letter order, which involved hemisphere-specific processing at the retinotopic level. As a test of SERIOL predictions, we conducted a consonant trigram-identification experiment, where the trigrams were briefly presented at various…

The "other-race" effect describes the phenomenon in which faces are difficult to distinguish from one another if they belong to an ethnic or racial group to which the observer has had little exposure. Adult observers typically display multiple forms of recognition error for other-race faces, and infants exhibit behavioral evidence of a developing…

Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…

Research points to a right hemisphere bias for processing social stimuli. Hemispheric specialization for attention shifts cued by social stimuli, however, has been rarely studied. We examined the capacity of each hemisphere to orient attention in response to social and nonsocial cues using a lateralized spatial cueing paradigm. We compared the…

Recently, an event-related potential (ERP) study (Lorenzo-Lopez et al., 2008) provided evidence that normal aging significantly delays and attenuates the electrophysiological correlate of the allocation of visuospatial attention (N2pc component) during a feature-detection visual search task. To further explore the effects of normal aging on the…

Previous research on dual-tasks has shown that, under some circumstances, actions impair the perception of action-consistent stimuli, whereas, under other conditions, actions facilitate the perception of action-consistent stimuli. We propose a new model to reconcile these contrasting findings. The planning and control model (PCM) of motorvisual…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to monitor infant brain activity during the initial encoding of a previously novel visual stimulus, and examined whether ERP measures of encoding predicted infants' subsequent performance on a visual memory task (i.e., the paired-comparison task). A late slow wave component of the ERP measured…

The purpose of my paper is to identify the difference between psychotherapy and art therapy. Then to introduce a technique within the field of art therapy that is relevant to neuro-plasticity Del Giacco Neuro Art Therapy. The paper identifies the importance of the amygdala and the hippocampus within the role of art therapy. Supporting…

Several studies have demonstrated that acquired expertise influences aesthetic judgments. In this paradigm we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study aesthetic judgments of visually presented architectural stimuli and control-stimuli (faces) for a group of architects and a group of non-architects. This design allowed us to test…

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to…

To test the hypothesis that biological motion perception is developmentally integrated with important social cognitive abilities, 12-month-olds (N = 36) were shown a display of a human point-light figure turning to observe a target. Infants spontaneously and reliably followed the figure's "gaze" despite the absence of familiar and socially…

Smooth pursuit eye movements are performed in order to prevent retinal image blur of a moving object. Rhesus monkeys are able to perform smooth pursuit eye movements quite similar as humans, even if the pursuit target does not consist in a simple moving dot. Therefore, the study of the neuronal responses as well as the consequences of…