The effectiveness of motor imagery training on cognitive performance was examined and the physiological mechanisms involved in the contribution of mental practice to motor learning were considered. The subject's mental effort during motor imagery was assessed by using psychophysiological measures and particularly eye blink activity as an…

We find a spatially asymmetric allocation of attention in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) despite the lack of obvious asymmetry in neurological indicators. Identification performance was measured for simple spatial patterns presented briefly to a locus 5 degrees into the left or right hemifield, after precuing attention to the same…

The main impacts of insulin favor the peripheral organs. Although it functions as a neuropeptide, insulin possesses also some central effects. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of intrahippocampal infusion of insulin on passive avoidance learning in healthy male rats. Thirty male wistar rats were divided into three groups (n = 10…

It is not known why people move their eyes when engaged in non-visual cognition. The current study tested the hypothesis that differences in saccadic eye movement rate (EMR) during non-visual cognitive tasks reflect different requirements for searching long-term memory. Participants performed non-visual tasks requiring relatively low or high…

Participants listened to the Asian disease problem framed in terms of either gains or losses and chose between two plans to combat the disease. All participants heard the problem embedded in other sounds; for some it was the relatively lower-frequency information, and for others it was the relatively higher-frequency information. The classic…

The representation of time and space are closely linked in the cognitive system. Optokinetic stimulation modulates spatial attention in healthy subjects and patients with spatial neglect. In order to evaluate whether optokinetic stimulation could influence time perception, a group of healthy subjects performed "time-comparison" tasks of sub- and…

The frequency of various types of unilateral spatial neglect and associated areas of neural dysfunction after left hemisphere stroke are not well characterized. Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) in distinct spatial reference frames have been identified after acute right, but not left hemisphere stroke. We studied 47 consecutive right handed…

In this study, the spatial limits of referred touch to a rubber hand were investigated. Participants rated the strength of the perceived illusion when the rubber hand was placed in one of six different spatial positions (at a distance of 17.5-67.5 cm horizontal from the participant's own hand). The results revealed a significant nonlinear…

We investigated how lateralized lexical decision is affected by the presence of distractors in the visual hemifield contralateral to the target. The study had three goals: first, to determine how the presence of a distractor (either a word or a pseudoword) affects visual field differences in the processing of the target; second, to identify the…

In this experimental study, effects of age and education on switching focal attention in working memory were investigated among 44 young (20-30 years) and 40 middle-aged individuals (50-60 years). To this end, a numeric n-back task comprising two lag conditions (1- and 2-back) was administered within groups. The results revealed a comparable…

It has been suggested that spindle neurons, an evolutionarily unique type of neuron, might be involved in higher-order social, emotional, and cognitive functions. As such, it was hypothesized that these neurons may be particularly important to the pathophysiology of autism, a disease characterized in part by disruption of higher-order social and…

The spatial frequency hypothesis contends that performance differences between the hemispheres on various visuospatial tasks are attributable to lateralized processing of the spatial frequency content of visual stimuli. Hellige has proposed that such lateralization could arise during infant development from the earlier maturation of the right…

We tested whether memory deficits in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) are better described by a single- or dual-store memory model. To this aim, we analyzed the influence of TLE and proactive interference (PI) on immediate and 24-h long-term recency effects during face recognition in 16 healthy participants and 18 right and 21 left non-surgical TLE…

Spatially lateralised deficits that typically define the hemispatial neglect syndrome have been shown to co-occur with other non-lateralised deficits of attention, memory, and drawing. However even a simple graphic task involves multiple planning components, including the specification of drawing start position and drawing direction. In order to…

Background/Hypothesis: The degree of attention directed to a stimulus and the presence of anisometric representations can alter the perception of the magnitude of a stimulus. We wanted to learn if normal right-handed subjects' estimates of distance traveled are influenced by the right-left direction or hemispace of movements. Methods: We had…