Metamemory refers to the ability of individuals to monitor and control their own memory performance. Although little theoretical consideration of the possible differences between the monitoring of episodic and of semantic knowledge has been published, results from patient and drug studies that used the "feeling of knowing" (FOK) paradigm show a…

Mechanisms consistent with long-term depression in the perirhinal cortex (PRh) play a fundamental role in object recognition memory; however, whether AMPA receptor endocytosis is involved in distinct phases of recognition memory is not known. To address this question, we used local PRh infusions of the cell membrane-permeable Tat-GluA2[subscript…

The goal of the present study was to elucidate the role of the human striatum in learning via reward and punishment during an associative learning task. Previous studies have identified the striatum as a critical component in the neural circuitry of reward-related learning. It remains unclear, however, under what task conditions, and to what…

Speakers often include extra information when producing referring expressions, which is inconsistent with the Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). In this study, we investigated how comprehension is affected by unnecessary information. The literature is mixed: some studies have found that extra information facilitates comprehension and others reported…

Individuals with text-based neglect dyslexia omit words on the neglected side of the sentence or text, usually on the left side. This study tested whether the syntactic structure of the target sentence affects reading in this type of neglect dyslexia. Because Hebrew is read from right to left, it enables testing whether the beginning of the…

We have investigated the effect of protein kinase Mzeta (PKM[zeta]) inhibition in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) upon the retention of a nonspatial learned active avoidance response and conditioned taste-aversion (CTA) acquisition in rats. ZIP (10 nmol/[mu]L) injected into the BLA 24 h after training impaired retention of a learned…

Prior research has demonstrated that the neural correlates of successful encoding ("subsequent memory effects") partially overlap with neural regions selectively engaged by the on-line demands of the study task. The primary goal of the present experiment was to determine whether this overlap is associated solely with encoding processes supporting…

In this review article, we summarize the main findings from empirical studies that used dance-related forms of rhythmical full body movement as a research tool for investigating action understanding and social cognition. This work has proven to be informative about behavioral and brain mechanisms that mediate links between perceptual and motor…

The current study manipulated the visual field and the number of senses of the first character in Chinese disyllabic compounds to investigate how the related senses (polysemy) of the constituted character in the compounds were represented and processed in the two hemispheres. The ERP results in experiment 1 revealed crossover patterns in the left…

Brain research indicates that repetition is of vital importance in the learning process. Repetition is an especially useful tool in the area of music education. The success of repetition can be enhanced by accurate and timely feedback. From "simple repetition" to "repetition with the addition or subtraction of degrees of freedom," there are many…

Humans have a tendency to perceive motion even in static images that simply "imply" movement. This tendency is so strong that our memory for actions depicted in static images is distorted in the direction of implied motion--a phenomenon known as representational momentum (RM). In the present study, we created an RM display depicting a pattern of…

The degree to which emotional aspects of stimuli are processed automatically is controversial. Here, we assessed the automatic elicitation of emotion-related brain potentials (ERPs) to positive, negative, and neutral words and facial expressions in an easy and superficial face-word discrimination task, for which the emotional valence was…

Previous studies have shown the appearance of right-sided language-related brain activity in right-handed patients after a stroke. Non-invasive brain stimulation such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) have been shown to modulate excitability in the brain. Moreover, rTMS and…

G. T. Fechner (1860/1966) famously described two kinds of psychophysics: "Outer psychophysics" captures the black box relationship between sensory inputs and perceptual magnitudes, whereas "inner psychophysics" contains the neural transformations that Fechner's outer psychophysics elided. The relationship between the two has never been clear.…

This study set out to investigate developmental differences in the ability to switch between choice tasks and to shift between Go/NoGo and choice tasks. Three age groups (7-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and young adults) were asked to consider the shape or color of a bivalued target stimulus. The participants performed a switch task in which a cue…