The background page on which a stimulus is presented can influence the allocation of attention to that stimulus. The purpose of this study was to learn if there are hemispheric asymmetries in how background distraction affects attentional processing. Asymmetries were investigated by having right eye dominant subjects perform line bisections and…

The relationship between brain volume and intelligence has been a topic of a scientific debate since at least the 1830s. To address the debate, a meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence was conducted. Based on 37 samples across 1530 people, the population correlation was estimated at 0.33. The correlation is…

This article examines the existence, description, perception, treatment, and outcome of symptoms consistent with autistic disorder in nineteenth-century London, England, based on case histories from the notes of Dr William Howship Dickinson at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Three cases meeting the DSM-IV criteria for autistic disorder…

This paper presents some theoretical and methodological considerations associated with the geographical and professional mobility of science professionals, including the conduct by the authors of a large scale survey questionnaire in Poland in 1994. It does not directly relate to research conducted elsewhere in the region, but does reflect…

The classical brain-language model derived from the work of Broca, Wernicke, Lichtheim, Geschwind, and others has been useful as a heuristic model that stimulates research and as a clinical model that guides diagnosis. However, it is now uncontroversial that the classical model is (i) empirically wrong in that it cannot account for the range of…

Recently several event-related potential attention studies have described a prefrontal positivity at about the same latency as the posterior N2 (approximately 200-300ms), variously termed the frontal selection positivity (FSP), the anterior P2 (P2a), or the frontal P3 (P3f). These components have a similar spatio-temporal distribution and similar…

In recent years, an exciting thrust in the developmental research literature has been the focus on ''executive'' functions (EF). However, the emphasis has been on the more purely cognitive aspects of EF operative in abstract reasoning and problem solving-aspects associated mainly with dorsolateral frontal regions. Although the literature on adult…

The study of subliminal perception in normal and brain lesioned subjects has long been of interest to scholars studying the neural mechanisms behind conscious vision. Using brief durations and a developed methodology of introspective reporting, we present an experiment with visual stimuli that gives rise to little or no subliminal perception under…

Data from experiments with split-brain patients, who have had their left and right hemispheres disconnected, suggests a remarkable specialization of function within each hemisphere. At the same time, these patients conduct their daily lives with great proficiency. This ability suggests that some information integral to coordinated function between…

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A (CMT1A) is commonly considered a prototype of a hereditary demyelinating polyneuropathy. Apart from the myelin involvement, there has been little information on axonal membrane properties in this condition. Taking advantage of the uniform nature of the disease process, we undertook the "in vivo" assessment of…

Recent studies using lesion, infusion, and unit-recording techniques suggest that the infralimbic (IL) subregion of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is necessary for the inhibition of conditioned fear following extinction. Brief microstimulation of IL paired with conditioned tones, designed to mimic neuronal tone responses, reduces the expression…

"The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University. The argument John Anderson gives…

This study was aimed at revealing which cognitive processes are lateralized in visual categorizations of "humans" by pigeons. To this end, pigeons were trained to categorize pictures of humans and then tested binocularly or monocularly (left or right eye) on the learned categorization and for transfer to novel exemplars (Experiment 1). Subsequent…

Recent data have shown that parallel processing by the cerebral hemispheres can expand the capacity of visual working memory for spatial locations (J. F. Delvenne, 2005) and attentional tracking (G. A. Alvarez & P. Cavanagh, 2005). Evidence that parallel processing by the cerebral hemispheres can improve item identification has remained elusive.…

Most naming treatments in aphasia either assume a phonological or semantic emphasis or a combination thereof. However, it is unclear whether semantic or phonological treatments recruit the same or different cortical areas in chronic aphasia. Employing three persons with aphasia, two of whom were non-fluent, the present study compared changes in…