This research tests whether mood affects semantic processing during discourse comprehension by facilitating integration of information congruent with moods' valence. Participants in happy, sad, or neutral moods listened to stories with positive or negative endings during EEG recording. N400 peak amplitudes showed mood congruence for happy and sad…

For a generation of children immersed in technology, emerging research suggests that while the temptation to multitask may be pervasive, the ability to control it could be the real bellwether of academic success. The pervasiveness of technology and social media, coupled with a fear of missing out on something important, has led students to pay…

During the last decade of the 20th century (the decade of the brain) large sums of money were spent in researching how the brain works in relation to our day-to-day activities. As a result, we now know to a much greater extent the roles played by various regions of the brain when we are carrying out various activities including learning. We also…

The neural mechanisms used in tone rises and falls in Mandarin were investigated. Nine participants were scanned while they named one-character pictures that required rising or falling tone responses in Mandarin: the left insula and right putamen showed stronger activation between rising and falling tones; the left brainstem showed weaker…

In studies on auditory speech perception, participants are often asked to perform active tasks, e.g. decide whether the perceived sound is a speech sound or not. However, information about the stimulus, inherent in such tasks, may induce expectations that cause altered activations not only in the auditory cortex, but also in frontal areas such as…

The goal of all teaching should be to help students make neural connections--the basis for all learning. To do that, however, the student has to have engagement and cognition around the material to be learned. At its core, dramatic activities, even when they have nothing to do with performance, have a tremendous ability to foster these…

Previous research on the lateralization of memory errors suggests that the right hemisphere's tendency to produce more memory errors than the left hemisphere reflects hemispheric differences in semantic activation. However, all prior research that has examined the lateralization of memory errors has used self-paced recognition judgments. Because…

The visual system has the remarkable ability to generalize across different viewpoints and exemplars to recognize abstract categories of objects, and to discriminate between different viewpoints and exemplars to recognize specific instances of particular objects. Behavioral experiments indicate the critical role of the right hemisphere in…

We present three event-related potential studies that investigated the contribution of givenness and position-induced topicality (what a sentence is about) to information processing. The studies compared two types of referential expressions (given and inferred noun phrases (NPs)) in distinct sentential positions. The data revealed…

Previous research indicates that, under explicit instructions to listen to spoken stimuli or in speech-oriented behavioural tasks, the brain's responses to senseless pseudowords are larger than those to meaningful words; the reverse is true in non-attended conditions. These differential responses could be used as a tool to trace linguistic…

For every claim in the neuroimaging literature about a particular brain region supporting syntactic processing, there exist other claims implicating the target region in different linguistic processes, and, in many cases, in non-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., Blumstein, 2009). We argue that traditional group analysis methods in neuroimaging…

An essential understanding about brain-based education is that most neuroscientists don't teach and most teachers don't do research. It's unrealistic to expect neuroscientists to reveal which classroom strategies will work best. That's not appropriate for neuroscientists, and most don't do that. Many critics could cite this as a weakness, but it's…

The current study examined the relationship between verbal memory span and the latency with which a filler-gap dependency is constructed. A previous behavioral study found that low span listeners did not exhibit antecedent reactivation at gap sites in relative clauses, in comparison to high verbal memory span subjects (Roberts et al. in "J…

In this study we investigated whether the human brain distinguishes between telic events that necessarily entail a specified endpoint (e.g., "reaching"), and atelic events with no delimitation or final state (e.g., "chasing"). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the patterns of neural response associated with verbs denoting…

When driving a vehicle, either the driver or a passenger (henceforth: backseat driver) may be responsible for navigation. Research on active navigation, primarily addressed in virtual environments, suggests that controlling navigation is more central for spatial learning than controlling movement. To test this assumption in a real-world scenario,…