To delineate the modulatory effects of induced positive affect on cognitive control, the current study investigated whether positive affect increases the ability to suppress a reflexive saccade in the antisaccade task. Results of the antisaccade task showed that participants made fewer erroneous prosaccades in the condition in which a positive…

In life, we must often learn new associations to people, places, or things we already know. The current fMRI study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying emotional memory updating. Nineteen participants first viewed negative and neutral pictures and learned associations between those pictures and other neutral stimuli, such as neutral…

Amino acids related to neurotransmitters and the GABAergic/glutamatergic system were measured using a 3 T-MRI instrument in 12 patients with autism and 10 normal controls. All measurements were performed in the frontal lobe (FL) and lenticular nuclei (LN) using a conventional sequence for n-acetyl aspartate (NAA) and glutamate (Glu), and the…

Face processing development is negatively affected when infants have not been exposed to faces for some time because of congenital cataract blocking all vision (Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2001). It is not clear, however, whether more subtle differences in face exposure may also have an influence. The present study looked at the effect of…

Memory is thought to be sparsely encoded throughout multiple brain regions forming unique memory trace. Although evidence has established that the amygdala is a key brain site for memory storage and retrieval of auditory conditioned fear memory, it remains elusive whether the auditory brain regions may be involved in fear memory storage or…

Using a combination of eye tracking and fMRI in a contextual cueing task, we explored the mechanisms underlying the facilitation of visual search for repeated spatial configurations. When configurations of distractors were repeated, greater activation in the right hippocampus corresponded to greater reductions in the number of saccades to locate…

Despite the fact that hemispheric asymmetry of attention has been widely studied, a clear picture of this complex phenomenon is still lacking. The aim of the present study was to provide an efficient and reliable measurement of potential hemispheric asymmetries of three attentional networks, i.e. alerting, orienting and executive attention.…

Thinking about other people's thoughts recruits a specific group of brain regions, including the temporo-parietal junctions (TPJ), precuneus (PC), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). The same brain regions were recruited when children (N = 20, 5-11 years) and adults (N = 8) listened to descriptions of characters' mental states, compared to…

Behavioral activation that is associated with incentive-reward motivation increases in adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood. This quadratic developmental pattern is generally supported by behavioral and experimental neuroscience findings. It is suggested that a focus on changes in dopamine neurotransmission is informative in…

The role of frontal cortex in selective attention to visual distractors was examined in an attentional capture task in which participants searched for a unique shape in the presence or absence of an additional colour singleton distractor. The presence of the additional singleton was associated with slower behavioural responses to the shape target,…

In this experiment we studied statistical learning, inter-trial priming, and visual attention. We assessed healthy controls and right brain damaged (RBD) patients with and without neglect, on a simple visual discrimination task designed to measure priming effects and probability learning. All participants showed a preserved priming effect for item…

Phonation is a fundamental feature of human communication. Control of phonation in the context of speech-language disturbances has traditionally been considered a characteristic of lesions to subcortical structures and pathways. Evidence suggests however, that cortical lesions may also implicate phonation. We carried out acoustic and perceptual…

In this research the role of the RH in the comprehension of speech acts (or illocutionary force) was examined. Two split-screen experiments were conducted in which participants made lexical decisions for lateralized targets after reading a brief conversation remark. On one-half of the trials the target word named the speech act performed with the…

Listeners perceive speech sounds relative to context. Contextual influences might differ over hemispheres if different types of auditory processing are lateralized. Hemispheric differences in contextual influences on vowel perception were investigated by presenting speech targets and both speech and non-speech contexts to listeners' right or left…

The current study used the directed forgetting paradigm in implicit and explicit memory to investigate the concreteness effect. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to explore the neural basis of this phenomenon. The behavioral results showed a clear concreteness effect in both implicit and explicit memory tests; participants responded…