In the current ERP study, an active oddball task was carried out, testing pure tones and auditory, visual and audiovisual syllables. For pure tones, an MMN, an N2b, and a P3 were found, confirming traditional findings. Auditory syllables evoked an N2 and a P3. We found that the amplitude of the P3 depended on the distance between standard and…

Objective: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) typically begins during adolescence and can persist into adulthood. The pathophysiological mechanisms underlying this disorder remain unclear. Recent evidence from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (R-fMRI) studies in adults suggests disruptions in amygdala-based circuitry; the…

The developmental disorder of Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with an overfriendly personality type, including an increased tendency to approach strangers. This atypical social approach behaviour (SAB) has been linked to two potential theories: the amygdala hypothesis and the frontal lobe hypothesis. The current study aimed to investigate…

The face-sensitive N170 is typically enhanced for inverted compared to upright faces. Itier, Alain, Sedore, and McIntosh (2007) recently suggested that this N170 inversion effect is mainly driven by the eye region which becomes salient when the face configuration is disrupted. Here we tested whether similar effects could be observed with non-face…

Unlike common nouns, person names refer to unique entities and generally have a referring function. We used event-related potentials to investigate the time course of identifying the emotional meaning of nouns and names. The emotional valence of names and nouns were manipulated separately. The results show early N1 effects in response to emotional…

Planning and executing volitional actions in the face of conflicting habitual responses is a critical aspect of human behavior. At the core of the interplay between these 2 control systems lies an override mechanism that can suppress the habitual action selection process and allow executive control to take over. Here, we construct a neural circuit…

Recent theories have suggested that chronic pain could be partly maintained by maladaptive physiological responses of the organism facing a recurrent stressor. The present study examined the associations between basal levels of cortisol collected over seven consecutive days, the hippocampal volumes and brain activation to thermal stimulations…

In this study we examined the effectiveness of a mobile game called MathDash for improving computational fluency as compared to a conventional drill and practice approach with computerized multiple-choice test items. An optical brain imaging method called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) was utilized to assess changes in neural…

We immunocytochemically identified microglia in fronto-insular (FI) and visual cortex (VC) in autopsy brains of well-phenotyped subjects with autism and matched controls, and stereologically quantified the microglial densities. Densities were determined blind to phenotype using an optical fractionator probe. In FI, individuals with autism had…

The left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (LvOT) is thought to be essential for the rapid parallel letter processing that is required for skilled reading. Here we investigate whether rapid written word identification in skilled readers can be supported by neural pathways that do not involve LvOT. Hypotheses were derived from a stroke patient who…

The amygdalae are key players in the processing of a variety of emotional stimuli. Especially aversive visual stimuli have been reported to attract attention and activate the amygdalae. However, as it has been argued that passively viewing withdrawal-related images could attenuate instead of activate amygdalae neuronal responses, its role under…

Functional neuroimaging studies of syntactic processing have been interpreted as identifying the neural locations of parsing and interpretive operations. However, current behavioral studies of sentence processing indicate that many operations occur simultaneously with parsing and interpretation. In this review, we point to issues that arise in…

The goal of this study was to examine hemispheric asymmetries in episodic memory for discourse. Access to previously comprehended information is essential for mapping incoming information to representations of "who did what to whom" in memory. An item-priming-in-recognition paradigm was used to examine differences in how the hemispheres represent…

Our goal was to characterize the effects of intensive aphasia therapy on the N400, an electrophysiological index of lexical-semantic processing. Immediately before and after 4 weeks of intensive speech-language therapy, people with aphasia performed a task in which they had to determine whether spoken words were a "match" or a "mismatch" to…

The current study examined auditory processing deficits in dyslexia using a dichotic pitch stimulus and functional MRI. Cortical activation by the dichotic pitch task occurred in bilateral Heschl's gyri, right planum temporale, and right superior temporal sulcus. Adolescents with dyslexia, relative to age-matched controls, illustrated greater…