The present study examined whether written syllable units are perceived in first steps of letter string processing. An illusory conjunction experiment was conducted while event-related potentials were recorded. Colored pseudowords were presented such that there was a match or mismatch between the syllable boundaries and the color boundaries. The…

It is unclear whether task conflict is reflected in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) or in more dorsal regions of the medial frontal cortex (MFC). When participants switch between tasks involving incongruent, congruent, and neutral stimuli, it is possible to examine both response conflict (incongruent vs. congruent) and task conflict (congruent…

Methodological issues relevant to magnetic resonance imaging studies of brain anatomy are discussed along with the findings on the neuroanatomic changes during childhood and adolescence. The development of the brain is also discussed.

The lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA) is implicated in emotional and social behaviors. We recently showed that in horizontal brain slices, activation of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) is a requirement for persistent synaptic alterations in the LA, such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). In the LA, NR2A- and NR2B-type NMDRs…

In this work, we apply Granger causality analysis to high spatiotemporal resolution intracranial EEG (iEEG) data to examine how different components of the left perisylvian language network interact during spoken language perception. The specific focus is on the characterization of serial versus parallel processing dependencies in the dominant…

Neural networks for processing language often are reorganized in patients with epilepsy. However, the extent and location of within and between hemisphere re-organization are not established. We studied 45 patients, all with a left hemisphere seizure focus (mean age 22.8, seizure onset 13.3), and 19 normal controls (mean age 24.8) with an fMRI…

The voice is a marker of a person's identity which allows individual recognition even if the person is not in sight. Listening to a voice also affords inferences about the speaker's emotional state. Both these types of personal information are encoded in characteristic acoustic feature patterns analyzed within the auditory cortex. In the present…

Both classical and recent reports suggest a right-hemisphere superiority for color discrimination. Testing highly-trained normal subjects and taking care to eliminate asymmetries from the testing situation, we found no significant differences between left and right hemifields or between upper and lower hemifields. This was the case for both of the…

Gamma-aminobutyric acid A (GABA[subscript A]) receptors are ligand-gated ion channels responsible for mediation of fast inhibitory action of GABA in the brain. Preliminary reports have demonstrated altered expression of GABA receptors in the brains of subjects with autism suggesting GABA/glutamate system dysregulation. We investigated the…

This study investigated noun-verb retrieval patterns of 30 adults with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia and 67 typical adults, to determine if schizophrenia affected nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) differently from verbs (associated with frontal lobe function). Stimuli were homophonic homographic homonyms, balanced according…

Gestural communication is a modality considered in the literature as a candidate for determining the ancestral prerequisites of the emergence of human language. As reported in captive chimpanzees and human children, a study in captive baboons revealed that a communicative gesture elicits stronger degree of right-hand bias than non-communicative…

Individual variation in the experience and expression of pleasure may relate to differential patterns of lateral frontal activity. Brain electrical measures have been used to study the asymmetric involvement of lateral frontal cortex in positive emotion, but the excellent time resolution of these measures has not been used to capture…

We studied the role of the frontal lobes in orienting spatial attention and inhibiting attentional capture by goal-irrelevant stimuli, using a spatial cueing method in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Two blocks of trials were presented, one with non-predictive cues and the other with counter-predictive cues. FTD patients showed a…

The purpose of this study was to analyze participants' levels of hemoglobin as they performed arithmetic mental calculations using Optical Topography (OT, helmet type brain-scanning system, also known as Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy or fNIRS). A central issue in cognitive neuroscience involves the study of how the human brain encodes and…

Adolescence is a time of increased divergence between males and females in physical characteristics, behavior, and risk for psychopathology. Here we will review data regarding sex differences in brain structure and function during this period of the lifespan. The most consistent sex difference in brain morphometry is the 9-12% larger brain size…