Several visuo-motor tasks can be used to demonstrate biases towards left hemispace in schizophrenic patients, suggesting a minor right hemineglect. Recent studies in neglect patients used a new number bisection task to highlight a lateralized defect in their visuo-spatial representation of numbers. To test a possible lateralized representational…

Velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS) has been in the focus of intensive research over the last 15 years. The syndrome represents a homogeneous model for studying the effect of a decreased dosage of genes on the development of brain structure and function and, consequently, on the emergence of schizophrenia-like psychotic disorder. In this review, we…

The amygdala has been implicated in the recognition of facial emotions, especially fearful expressions, in adults with early-onset right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The present study investigates the recognition of facial emotions in children and adolescents, 8-16 years old, with epilepsy. Twenty-nine subjects had TLE (13 right, 16 left) and…

After hemispherectomy (removal or disconnection of an entire cerebral hemisphere) in childhood for treatment of intractable epilepsy, gross speech and language functions are often rescued. Whether more complex functions, such as syntactic processing, are selectively impaired, remains controversial. Here we present a cross-sectional study of…

In individuals with autism or autism-spectrum-disorder (ASD), conflicting results have been reported regarding the processing of biological motion tasks. As biological motion perception and recognition might be related to impaired imitation, gross motor skills and autism specific psychopathology in individuals with ASD, we performed a functional…

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disabling disorder, characterized by persistent or relapsing fatigue. Recent studies have detected a decrease in cortical grey matter volume in patients with CFS, but it is unclear whether this cerebral atrophy constitutes a cause or a consequence of the disease. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an…

Cognitive performance is affected by an individual's characteristics and the environment, as well as by the nature of the task and the amount of practice at it. Mental performance tests range in complexity and include subjective estimates of mood, simple objective tests (reaction time), and measures of complex performance that require decisions to…

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal…

In her critique of emotional intelligence (EI) theory and research, Waterhouse (2006) makes several claims. First, she argues that there are "many conflicting constructs of EI," implying that it cannot be a valid concept given this multiplicity of views. Second, she cites some research and opinion suggesting that "EI has not been differentiated…

Gray matter volumes of Heschl's gyrus (HG), planum temporale (PT), pars triangularis (PTR), and pars opercularis were measured on MRI in 48 healthy right-handers. There was the expected leftward PT asymmetry in 70.8%, and leftward PTR asymmetry in 64.6% of the sample. When asymmetry patterns within individuals were examined, there was not one…

Both cerebral hemispheres contain phonological, orthographic and semantic representations of words, however there are between-hemisphere differences in the relative engagement and specialization of the different representations. Taking orthographic processing for example, previous studies suggest that orthographic neighbourhood size (N) has…

To account for the mechanism of number transcoding, many authors have proposed various models, for example, semantic-abstract model, lexical-semantic model, triple-code model, and so on. However, almost all of them are based on the symptoms of patients with left cerebral damage. Previously, I reported two Japanese patients with right posterior…

Recent studies have reported new evidence consistent with the hypothesis that reactivating a memory by re-exposure to a training context destabilizes the memory and induces "reconsolidation." In the present experiments, rats' memory for inhibitory avoidance (IA) training was tested 6 h (Test 1), 2 d (Test 2), and 6 d (Test 3) after training. On…

Operant conditioning of the H-reflex, the electrical analog of the spinal stretch reflex, is a simple model of skill acquisition and involves plasticity in the spinal cord. Previous work showed that the cerebellum is essential for down-conditioning the H-reflex. This study asks whether the cerebellum is also essential for maintaining…

Transcriptional activation is a key process required for long-term memory formation. Recently, the transcriptional coactivator CREB-binding protein (CBP) was shown to be critical for hippocampus-dependent long-term memory and hippocampal synaptic plasticity. As a coactivator with intrinsic histone acetyltransferase activity, CBP interacts with…