Motor timing is essential for performing self-initiated movement sequences. Here, we investigated how sequence rhythm, or the timing for co-ordinating movements within a sequence, contributes to action preparation, compared with other processes occurring during sequence planning. First, we recorded the readiness potential (RP) in a condition of…

The past few years have seen considerable interest in findings of abnormal brain connectivity in the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We review recent work from neuroimaging and other sources, and argue that there is considerable convergent evidence suggesting that connectivity is disrupted in ASD. We point to evidence both of local…

In this study we quantify for the first time electrophysiological components associated with incorporating long-term semantic knowledge with visuo-spatial information using two variants of a traditional matrix patterns task. Results indicated that the matrix task with greater semantic content was associated with enhanced accuracy and RTs in a…

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…

The objective of this study investigated cognitive impairments and their correlations with fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) in patients with neuromyelitis optica (NMO) without visible lesions on conventional brain MRI during acute relapse. Twenty one patients with NMO and 21 normal control subjects received several cognitive…

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and…

Emotionally arousing information is treated in a specialised manner across a number of different processing stages, and memory for affective events is often found to be heightened by virtue of this. However, in some cases, emotional experiences might be the very ones that we would like to forget. Here, two item-method directed forgetting studies…

Fluctuating sex hormone levels during the menstrual cycle have been shown to affect functional cerebral asymmetries in cognitive domains. These effects seem to result from the neuromodulatory properties of sex hormones and their metabolites on interhemispheric processing. The present study was carried out to investigate whether functional cerebral…

The present study applied the Simon effect task to examine the pattern of functional brain reorganization in individuals with Friedreich ataxia (FRDA), using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Thirteen individuals with FRDA and 14 age and sex matched controls participated, and were required to respond to either congruent or incongruent…

The nature of obsessions has led researchers to try to determine if the main problem in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is impaired inhibitory control. Previous studies report that the effort to suppress is one of the factors that increase the frequency of obsessive thoughts. Based on these results and those of the present study that suggest…

Sometimes object detection as opposed to identification is sufficient to initiate the appropriate action. To explore the neural origin of behavioural differences between the two tasks, we combine psychophysical measurements and fMRI, specifically contrasting shape detection versus identification of a figure. This figure consisted of Gabor elements…

Manual responses can be primed by viewing an image of a hand. The left-right identity of the viewed hand reflexively facilitates responses of the hand that corresponds to the identity. Previous research also suggests that when the response activation is triggered by an arrow, which is backward-masked and presented briefly, the activation manifests…

The deterioration of performance over time is characteristic for sustained attention tasks. This so-called "performance decrement" is measured by the increase of reaction time (RT) over time. Some behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms of this phenomenon are not yet fully understood. Behaviourally, we examined the increase of RT over time and…

Previous studies have asked whether visual sensitivity and attentional processing in deaf signers are enhanced or altered as a result of their different sensory experiences during development, i.e., auditory deprivation and exposure to a visual language. In particular, deaf and hearing signers have been shown to exhibit a right visual field/left…

Action observation (AO) and movement imagery (MI) have been reported to share similar neural networks. This study investigated the congruency between AO and MI using the eye gaze metrics, dwell time and fixation number. A simple reach-grasp-place arm movement was observed and, in a second condition, imagined where the movement was presented from…