Background: The ability to modulate emotional responses, or emotion regulation, is a key mechanism in the development of mood disruptions. Detection of a neural marker for emotion regulation thus has the potential to inform early detection and intervention for mood problems. One such neural marker may be the late positive potential (LPP), which is…

Early-onset schizophrenia appears to be clinically more severe than the adult-onset form of the disease. In a previous study, we showed that anatomically related grey and white matter abnormalities found in adolescents patients were larger and more widespread than what had been reported in the literature on adult schizophrenia. Particularly, we…

The Sustained Attention to Response task is a classical neuropsychological test that has been used by many centres to characterize the attentional deficits in traumatic brain injury, ADHD, autism and other disorders. During the SART a random series of digits 1-9 is presented repeatedly and subjects have to respond to each digit (go trial) except…

This paper outlines the strengths and weaknesses in both short-term and long-term memory in Down syndrome, and the implications of these patterns for both other aspects of cognitive development and underlying neural pathology. There is clear evidence that Down syndrome is associated with particularly poor verbal short-term memory performance, and…

The frequency of various types of unilateral spatial neglect and associated areas of neural dysfunction after left hemisphere stroke are not well characterized. Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) in distinct spatial reference frames have been identified after acute right, but not left hemisphere stroke. We studied 47 consecutive right handed…

Variability in talker identity, one type of indexical variation, has demonstrable effects on the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. Furthermore, neuropsychological evidence suggests that indexical and linguistic information may be represented and processed differently in the 2 cerebral hemispheres, and is consistent with findings from…

Learning to read is a complex process that requires multiple areas of the brain to operate together through intricate networks of neurons. The author of this article, a neurologist and middle school teacher, takes exception to interpretations of neuroimaging research that treat reading as an isolated, independent cognitive process. She…

Extensive evidence indicates that the septum plays a predominant role in fear learning, yet the direction of this control is still a matter of debate. Increasing data suggest that the medial (MS) and lateral septum (LS) would be differentially required in fear conditioning depending on whether a discrete conditional stimulus (CS) predicts, or not,…

Septal infusions of the [gamma]-aminobutyric acid (GABA)[subscript A] agonist muscimol impair memory, and the effect likely involves the hippocampus. GABA[subscript A] receptors are present on the perikarya of cholinergic and GABAergic septo-hippocampal (SH) projections. The current experiments determined whether GABAergic SH projections are…

Subfields of the hippocampus display differential dynamics in processing a spatial environment, especially when changes are introduced to the environment. Specifically, when familiar cues in the environment are spatially rearranged, place cells in the CA3 subfield tend to rotate with a particular set of cues (e.g., proximal cues), maintaining a…

We have previously shown that fear extinction is accompanied by an increase of synaptic efficacy in inputs from the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) and mediodorsal thalamus (MD) to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and that disrupting these changes to mPFC synaptic transmission compromises extinction processes. The aim of this study was to examine…

Long-term memories are influenced by the emotion experienced during learning as well as by the emotion experienced during memory retrieval. The present article reviews the literature addressing the effects of emotion on retrieval, focusing on the cognitive and neurological mechanisms that have been revealed. The reviewed research suggests that the…

Previous studies have suggested a right hemineglect in schizophrenia, however few assessed possible visual-perceptual implication in this lateralized anomaly. A manual line bisection without (i.e., lines presented on their own) or with a local cueing paradigm (i.e., a number placed at one or both ends of the line) and the Motor-free Visual…

Research indicates that right-hemisphere mechanisms are specifically sensitive to and averse to risk. Research also indicates that mixed degree of handedness is associated with increased access to right hemisphere processing. Accordingly, it was predicted that mixed-handers would exhibit greater risk aversion. Participants were presented with…

Functional MRI was used to investigate brain activation in healthy volunteers during encoding of unfamiliar faces as well as during correct recognition of newly learned faces (CR) compared to correct identification of distractor faces (CF), missed alarms (not recognizing previously presented faces, MA), and false alarms (incorrectly recognizing…