Alzheimer's disease (AD) can impair metacognition in addition to more basic cognitive functions like memory. However, while global metacognitive inaccuracies are well documented (i.e., low deficit awareness, or anosognosia), the evidence is mixed regarding the effects of AD on local or task-based metacognitive judgments. Here we investigated local…

More than 5 million deaths a year are attributable to tobacco smoking, making it the largest single cause of preventable death worldwide. The primary addictive component in tobacco is nicotine. Its addictive power is exemplified by the fact that by far most attempts to quit smoking fail. It is therefore mandatory to understand the biological…

The goal of this study was to examine the claim that amodal deficits in attentional shifting may be the source of reading acquisition disorders in phonological developmental dyslexia (sluggish attentional shifting, SAS, theory, Hari & Renvall, 2001). We investigated automatic attentional shifting in the auditory and visual modalities in 13…

Visual peripersonal space (i.e., the space immediately surrounding the body) is represented by multimodal neurons integrating tactile stimuli applied on a body part with visual stimuli delivered near the same body part, e.g., the hand. Tool use may modify the boundaries of the peri-hand area, where vision and touch are integrated. The neural…

The magnocellular (M) pathway hypothesis proposes that impaired visual motion perception observed in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) might be mediated by atypical functioning of the subcortical M pathway, as this pathway provides the bulk of visual input to cortical motion detectors. To test this hypothesis, we measured luminance…

Recently, an event-related potential (ERP) study (Lorenzo-Lopez et al., 2008) provided evidence that normal aging significantly delays and attenuates the electrophysiological correlate of the allocation of visuospatial attention (N2pc component) during a feature-detection visual search task. To further explore the effects of normal aging on the…

Vision often dominates audition when attentive processes are involved (e.g., the ventriloquist effect), yet little is known about the relative potential of the two modalities to initiate a "break through of the unattended". The present study was designed to systematically compare the capacity of task-irrelevant auditory and visual events to…

Evidence from neuropsychology suggests that the distinction between animate and inanimate kinds is fundamental to human cognition. Previous neuroimaging studies have reported that viewing animate objects activates ventrolateral visual brain regions, whereas inanimate objects activate ventromedial regions. However, these studies have typically…

Motor involvement in speech perception has been recently studied using a variety of techniques. In the current study, EEG measurements from Cz, C3 and C4 electrodes were used to examine the relative power of the mu rhythm (i.e., 8-13 Hz) in response to various audio-visual speech and non-speech stimuli, as suppression of these rhythms is…

Neurophysiological studies yield contrary results whether attentional problems of patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are related to early visual processing deficits or not. Evoked gamma-band responses (GBRs), being among the first cortical responses occurring as early as 90 ms after visual stimulation in human EEG, have…

We present the first comprehensive review of research into hemianopic dyslexia since Mauthner's original description of 1881. We offer an explanation of the reading impairment in patients with unilateral homonymous visual field disorders and clarify its functional and anatomical bases. The major focus of our review is on visual information…

Traditional neuropsychology employs visual half-field (VHF) experiments to assess cerebral language dominance. This approach is based on the assumption that left cerebral dominance for language leads to faster and more accurate recognition of words in the right visual half-field (RVF) than in the left visual half-field (LVF) during tachistoscopic…

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his…

In an early description of the mu rhythm, Gastaut and Bert [Gastaut, H. J., & Bert, J. (1954). EEG changes during cinematographic presentation. "Clinical Neurophysiology", 6, 433-444] noted that it was blocked when an individual identified himself with an active person on the screen, suggesting that it may be modulated by the degree to which the…

When we attend to other people in pain, the neural circuits underpinning the processing of first-hand experience of pain are activated in the observer. This basic somatic sensorimotor resonance plays a critical role in the primitive building block of empathy and moral reasoning that relies on the sharing of others' distress. However, the…