Theories of attentional control are divided over whether the capture of spatial attention depends primarily on stimulus salience or is contingent on attentional control settings induced by task demands. The authors addressed this issue using the N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc) effect, a component of the event-related brain potential thought to…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to evaluate aspects of the "functional distance hypothesis," which predicts that tasks regulated by brain networks in closer anatomic proximity will interfere more with each other than tasks controlled by spatially distant regions. Speech, verbal fluency, and manual motor tasks were examined to ascertain whether…

Early periventricular brain lesions can not only cause cerebral palsy, but can also induce a reorganization of language. Here, we asked whether these different functional consequences can be attributed to topographically distinct portions of the periventricular white matter damage. Eight patients with pre- and perinatally acquired left-sided…

In "A tale of two cases: Lessons for education from the study of two boys living with half their brains" (M. H. Immordino-Yang, 2007), I showed that Nico (missing his right cerebral hemisphere) and Brooke (missing his left) had compensated for basic neuropsychological skills to previously unexpected degrees and argued that the ways they had…

Methodological ingenuity and deep knowledge of expected development are combined by Immordino-Yang to produce an enlightening analysis of 2 hemispherectomized youths. Specific lessons to be drawn from her article include the following: the limitations of anatomy in predicting function; the need for educators to understand fully the…

It has been claimed that verb processing (as opposed to noun processing) is subserved by specific neural circuits in the left prefrontal cortex. In this study, we took advantage of the unusual grammatical characteristics of clitic pronouns in Italian (e.g., "lo" and "la" in "portalo" and "portala" "bring it [masculine]/[feminine]",…

Often a young child's challenging behavior results from emotional flooding--being overwhelmed by one's emotions. The authors explain that in children, the "thinking brain," the cerebral cortex, is not fully developed, and children get emotionally overwhelmed more easily than adults because they process their experiences through the "emotional…

To do research that really makes a difference--the authors of this book argue--social scientists need questions and methods that reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, "Methods that Matter" offers compelling and successful examples of mixed methods research that do just…

The high incidence of number transcoding deficits in aphasic subjects suggests there is a strong similarity between language and number domains. However, recent single case studies of subjects who showed a dissociation between word and number word transcoding led us to hypothesize that the two types of stimuli are represented independently in the…

Variation in the number of sex chromosomes is a relatively common genetic condition, affecting as many as 1/400 individuals. The sex chromosome aneuploidies (SCAs) are associated with characteristic behavioral and cognitive phenotypes, although the degree to which specific individuals are affected can fall within a wide range. Understanding the…

Drawing from the literature in neuroeconomics, organizational justice, and social cognitive neuroscience, I propose a model of neuro-organizational justice that explores the role of the brain in how people form fairness judgments and react to situations of fairness and/or unfairness in organizations. The model integrates three levels of analysis:…

The evolution of language and the evolution of the brain are tightly interlinked. Language evolution represents a special kind of adaptation, in part because language is a complex behavior (as opposed to a physical feature) but also because changes are adaptive only to the extent that they increase either one's understanding of others, or one's…

Cerebellar pathology is associated with impairments on a range of motor learning tasks including sequence learning. However, various lines of evidence are at odds with the idea that the cerebellum plays a central role in the associative processes underlying sequence learning. Behavioral studies indicate that sequence learning, at least with short…

Past experience is hypothesized to reduce computational demands in PFC by providing bottom-up predictive information that informs subsequent stimulus-action mapping. The present fMRI study measured cortical activity reductions ("neural priming"/"repetition suppression") during repeated stimulus classification to investigate the mechanisms through…

The study investigated the processing of sound motion, employing a psychophysical motion discrimination task in combination with electroencephalography. Following stationary auditory stimulation from a central space position, the onset of left- and rightward motion elicited a specific cortical response that was lateralized to the hemisphere…