Theoretical and empirical research has linked poor emotion regulation abilities with dysfunctional frontolimbic circuitry. Consistent with this, research on borderline personality disorder (BPD) finds that frontolimbic dysfunction is a predominant neural substrate underlying the disorder. Emotion regulation is profoundly compromised in BPD.…

Imaging studies in blind subjects have consistently shown that sensory and cognitive tasks evoke activity in the occipital cortex, which is normally visual. The precise areas involved and degree of activation are dependent upon the cause and age of onset of blindness. Here, we investigated the cortical language network at rest and during an…

In motor speech disorders, dysarthric features impacting intelligibility, articulation, fluency and voice emerge more saliently in conversation than in repetition, reading or singing. A role of the basal ganglia in these task discrepancies has been identified. Further, more recent studies of naturalistic speech in basal ganglia dysfunction have…

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition have been previously examined in alphabetic languages. However, it is unknown whether orthographic information affects spoken word recognition in Chinese, which has a clean dissociation between orthography (O) and phonology (P). The present study investigated orthographic effects using event…

In deja vu, a phenomenological impression of familiarity for the current visual environment is experienced with a sense that it should in fact not feel familiar. The fleeting nature of this phenomenon in daily life, and the difficulty in developing experimental paradigms to elicit it, has hindered progress in understanding deja vu. Some…

The aims of the present study are twofold: (1) to examine cortical morphology (CM) associated with alterations in cognition in fragile X syndrome (FXS); (2) to characterize the CM profile of FXS versus FXS with an autism diagnosis (FXS+Aut) as a preliminary attempt to further elucidate the behavioral distinctions between the two sub-groups. We…

In two behavioral experiments involving lateralized stimulus presentation, we tested whether one of the most commonly used measures of holistic face processing--the composite face effect--would be more pronounced for stimuli presented to the right as compared to the left hemisphere. In experiment 1, we investigated the composite face effect in a…

We report a series of ERP and eye-tracking experiments investigating, (a) whether English-French learners can process grammatical gender online, (b) whether cross-linguistic similarities influence this ability, and (c) whether the syntactic distance between elements affects agreement processing. To address these questions we visually presented…

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…

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…

According to Bowers, the finding that there are neurons with highly selective responses to familiar stimuli supports theories positing localist representations over approaches positing the type of distributed representations typically found in parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. However, his conclusions derive from an overly narrow view…

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is crucially has been found to be involved in syntactic processing of various kinds. This study investigates the cortical effects of two types of syntactic processes: (i) Reconstruction in ellipsis (recovery of left-out material given by context, "More people have been to Paris than" [...] "to…

Individuals with autism often show a fragmented way of perceiving their environment, suggesting a disorder of information integration, possibly due to disrupted communication between brain areas. We investigated thirteen individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and thirteen healthy controls using the metastable motion quartet, a stimulus…

Odor-shock memory in "Drosophila melanogaster" consists of heterogeneous components each with different dynamics. We report that a null mutant for the evolutionarily conserved synaptic protein Synapsin entails a memory deficit selectively in early memory, leaving later memory as well as sensory motor function unaffected. Notably, a consolidated…

Background: Psychopathic traits are associated with increases in antisocial behaviors such as aggression and are characterized by reduced empathy for others' distress. This suggests that psychopathic traits may also impair empathic pain sensitivity. However, whether psychopathic traits affect responses to the pain of others versus the self…