Multisensory integration of spatial information occurs late in childhood, at around eight years (Gori, Del Viva, Sandini, & Burr, 2008). For younger children, the haptic system dominates size discrimination and vision dominates orientation discrimination: the dominance may reflect "sensory calibration," and could have direct consequences on…

Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…

In an experimental paradigm adapted from Hari (1995), forty observers listened via headphones to 8 binaural clicks: 4 left-ear leading followed by 4 right-ear leading with either 38 or 140 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Concurrently, they viewed either foveal or peripheral visual stimuli designed to activate either the parvocellular or…

Efficient reading relies on expertise in the visual word form area, with abnormalities in the functional specialization of this area observed in individuals with developmental dyslexia. We have investigated event related potentials in print tuning in adults with dyslexia, based on their N170 response at 135-255 ms. Control and dyslexic adults…

The present study employed dynamic causal modeling to investigate the effective functional connectivity between regions of the neural network involved in top-down letter processing. We used an illusory letter detection paradigm in which participants detected letters while viewing pure noise images. When participants detected letters, the response…

In a noisy environment, visual perception of articulatory movements improves natural speech intelligibility. Parallel to phonemic processing based on auditory signal, visemic processing constitutes a counterpart based on "visemes", the distinctive visual units of speech. Aiming at investigating the neural substrates of visemic processing in a…

The present study contrasted the neural correlates of encoding item-context associations according to whether the contextual information was visual or auditory. Subjects (N = 20) underwent fMRI scanning while studying a series of visually presented pictures, each of which co-occurred with either a visually or an auditorily presented name. The task…

Figure copy is the most common method of visual spatial assessment in dementia evaluations, but performance on this test may be multifactorial. We examined the neuroanatomical substrates of figure copy performance in 46 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 48 patients with the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). A group of…

Paired associates learning is impaired in both schizophrenia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which may reflect hippocampal pathology. In addition, schizophrenia is characterized by the dysfunction of the retino-geniculo-striatal magnocellular (M) visual pathway. The purpose of this study was to investigate the interaction between…

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…

A series of experiments test the recent claim that the hippocampus is necessary for the binding of features in working memory. Some potential limitations of studies underlying this claim are discussed, and an attempt is made to further test the hypothesis by studying a case of developmental amnesia whose extensively investigated pathology appears…

Visual illusions have been shown to affect perceptual judgements more so than motor behaviour, which was interpreted as evidence for a functional division of labour within the visual system. The dominant perception-action theory argues that perception involves a holistic processing of visual objects or scenes, performed within the ventral,…

Cerebral patterns of activity elicited by dual-task performance throughout the learning of a complex bimanual coordination pattern were addressed. Subjects (N = 12) were trained on the coordination pattern and scanned using fMRI at early (PRE) and late (POST) learning stages. During scanning, the coordination pattern was performed either as a…

Previous studies have shown that in comparison with the sighted, blind individuals display superior non-visual perceptual abilities and differ in brain organisation. In this study, we investigated the performance of blind and sighted participants on a vibrotactile discrimination task. Thirty-three blind participants were classified into one of…

Whether and in what way enumeration processes differ for small and large sets of objects is still a matter of debate. In order to shed light on this issue, EEG data were obtained from 60 normally developing elementary school children. Adopting a standard non-symbolic numerical comparison paradigm allowed us to manipulate numerical distance between…