Recent work has given rise to the view that reward-based decision making is governed by two key controllers: a habit system, which stores stimulus-response associations shaped by past reward, and a goal-oriented system that selects actions based on their anticipated outcomes. The current literature provides a rich body of computational theory…

Arcimboldo images induce the perception of faces when shown upright despite the fact that only nonfacial objects such as vegetables and fruits are painted. In the current study, we examined whether infants recognize a face in the Arcimboldo images by using the preferential looking technique and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). In the first…

Depression is a developmental phenomenon. Considerable progress has been made in describing the syndrome, establishing its prevalence and features, providing clues as to its etiology, and developing evidence-based treatment and prevention options. Despite considerable headway in distinct lines of vulnerability research, there is an explanatory gap…

If you really want to see how innovative a school is, inquire about its thinking and practices regarding assessment. For the students, does the mere thought of assessment trigger stress? Do the teachers rely heavily on high-stakes, multiple-choice, Bell Curve-generating tests? Or do the students seem relaxed and engaged as teachers experiment with…

The capacity to engage and communicate in a social world is one of the defining characteristics of the human species. While the network of regions that compose the social brain have been the subject of extensive research in adults, there are limited techniques available for monitoring young infants. This study used near infrared spectroscopy to…

The widely held belief in a central role of left parietal lesions for apraxia can be traced back to Liepmann's model of a posterior to anterior stream converting mental images of intended action into motor execution. Although this model has undergone significant changes, its modern descendants still attribute the parietal contribution to the…

Hemispheric differences in the learning and generalization of pattern categories were explored in two experiments involving sixteen patients with unilateral posterior, cerebral lesions in the left (LH) or right (RH) hemisphere. In each experiment participants were first trained to criterion in a supervised learning paradigm to categorize a set of…

Geschwind and Behan (1982) and Geschwind and Galaburda (1985a, 1985b, 1985c) suggested a correlation between brain laterality and immune disorders. To test whether this hypothesis holds true not only for the frequency of immune diseases and circulating autoantibodies, but extends also to cellular immunity, we examined the association between…

Attention deactivates the inferior medial prefrontal cortex (IMPC), but it is uncertain if emotions can attenuate this deactivation. To test the extent to which common emotions interfere with attention, we measured changes of a blood flow index of brain activity in key areas of the IMPC with positron emission tomography (PET) of labeled water…

A basic challenge for research into the neurobiology of language is understanding how the brain combines words to make complex representations. Linguistic theory divides this task into several computations including syntactic structure building and semantic composition. The close relationship between these computations, however, poses a strong…

Tourette syndrome is a childhood-onset neuropsychiatric disorder with a high prevalence of attention deficit hyperactivity and obsessive-compulsive disorder co-morbidities. Structural changes have been found in frontal cortex and striatum in children and adolescents. A limited number of morphometric studies in Tourette syndrome persisting into…

Studies in rats and non-human primates suggest that medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures play a role in perceptual processing, with the hippocampus necessary for spatial discrimination, and the perirhinal cortex for object discrimination. Until recently, there was little convergent evidence for analogous functional specialisation in humans, or…

Re-telling a story is thought to produce a progressive refinement in the mental representation of the discourse. A neuroanatomical substrate for this compression effect, however, has yet to be identified. We used a discourse re-listening task and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions responsive to repeated…

A number of experimental paradigms use in vitro brain slices to test for changes in synaptic transmission and plasticity following a behavioral manipulation. For example, a number of previous studies have reported a variety of effects of environmental enrichment (EE) exposure on field potential responses in hippocampal slices, but in no study was…

Lesion and neuroimaging studies suggest that orbito-frontal cortex (OFC) supports temporal aspects of episodic memory. However, it is unclear whether OFC contributes to the encoding and/or retrieval of temporal context and whether it is selective for temporal relative to nontemporal (spatial) context memory. We addressed this issue with two…