Previous studies with brain-injured patients have suggested that language abilities are necessary for complex problem-solving, even when tasks are non-verbal. In the current study, we tested this notion by analyzing behavioral and neuroimaging data from a large group of left-hemisphere stroke patients (n = 107) suffering from a range of language…

Individuals scoring high in fluid intelligence tasks generally perform very efficiently in problem solving tasks and analogical reasoning tasks presumably because they are able to select the task-relevant information very quickly and focus on a limited set of task-relevant cognitive operations. Moreover, individuals with high fluid intelligence…

Objective: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasingly viewed as a disorder of functional networks, highlighting the importance of investigating white matter and interregional connectivity. We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine white matter integrity for the whole brain and for corpus callosum, internal capsule, and middle…

Unaccusative verbs like "fall" are special in that their sole argument is syntactically generated at the object position of the verb rather than at the subject position. Unaccusative verbs are derived by a lexical operation that reduces the agent from transitive verbs. Their insertion into a sentence often involves a syntactic movement from the…

Suppressing irrelevant words is essential to successful speech production and is expected to involve general control mechanisms that reduce interference from task-unrelated processing. To investigate the neural mechanisms that suppress visual word interference, we used fMRI and a Stroop task, using a block design with an event-related analysis.…

According to embodied theories of language, people understand a verb like "throw", at least in part, by mentally simulating "throwing". This implicit simulation is often assumed to be similar or identical to motor imagery. Here we used fMRI to test whether implicit simulations of actions during language understanding involve the same cortical…

The debate regarding the role of ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOTC) in visual word recognition arises, in part, from difficulty delineating the functional contributions of vOTC as separate from other areas of the reading network. Here, we investigated the feasibility of using TMS to interfere with vOTC processing in order to explore its…

Injured nerves regenerate slowly and often over long distances. Prolonged periods for regenerating nerves to make functional connections with denervated targets prolong the period of isolation of the neurons from the target (chronic axotomy) and of the denervation of Schwann cells in the distal nerve pathways (chronic denervation). In an animal…

Electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging evidence points to the existence of neural populations that respond strongly and selectively to the appearance of the human body and its parts. However, the relationship between ERP and fMRI markers of these populations remains unclear. Here we used a previously identified functional dissociation…

Proteolysis by the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway (UPP) has emerged as a new molecular mechanism that controls wide-ranging functions in the nervous system, including fine-tuning of synaptic connections during development and synaptic plasticity in the adult organism. In the UPP, attachment of a small protein, ubiquitin, tags the substrates for…

In an effort to clarify whether semantic integration is impaired in verbal and nonverbal auditory domains in children with developmental language impairment (a.k.a., LI and SLI), the present study obtained behavioral and neural responses to words and environmental sounds in children with language impairment and their typically developing…

In the present study, the authors focused on the use of electroencephalography (EEG) data about cognitive workload and sustained attention to predict math problem solving outcomes. EEG data were recorded as students solved a series of easy and difficult math problems. Sequences of attention and cognitive workload estimates derived from the EEG…

This dissertation articulates a writing pedagogy based on a theory of "intermodality" to help writing instructors navigate the affordances and challenges of multimodal composition. Drawing from recent discoveries in neuroscience about how the brain makes meaning, I situate this pedagogy of intermodality--literally, "between the…

A number of human brain areas showing a larger response to faces than to objects from different categories, or to scrambled faces, have been identified in neuroimaging studies. Depending on the statistical criteria used, the set of areas can be overextended or minimized, both at the local (size of areas) and global (number of areas) levels. Here…

Behavioral inhibition is a temperament characterized in infancy and early childhood by a tendency to withdraw from novel or unfamiliar stimuli. Children exhibiting this disposition, relative to children with other dispositions, are more socially reticent, less likely to initiate interaction with peers, and more likely to develop anxiety over time.…