Complex fear learning procedures might be better suited than the common differential fear-conditioning paradigm for detecting individual differences related to vulnerability for anxiety disorders. Two such procedures are the blocking procedure and the protection-from-overshadowing procedure. Their comparison allows for the examination of discriminatory fear learning under conditions of ambiguit...

The relationship between children's language acquisition and their nonverbal intelligence has a long tradition of scientific inquiry. Current attention focuses on the use of nonverbal IQ level as an exclusionary criterion in the definition of specific language impairment (SLI). Grammatical tense deficits are known as a clinical marker of SLI, but the relationship with nonverbal intelligence bel...

A new natural language system, TINA, has been developed for applications involving spoken language tasks. TINA integrates key ideas from context free grammars, Augmented Transition Networks (ATN's), and the unification concept. TINA provides a seamless interface between syntactic and semantic analysis, and also produces a highly constraining probabilistic language model to improve recognition p...

Autobiographical memory is constituted by different representations including general knowledge about one's past (semantic component) and specific personal events (episodic component). Some old memories can remain very vivid because they are particularly important for the subject's identity. The aim of this paper is, in the first part, to present a review of the properties of these memories, ca...

We have empirically discovered that the space of human actions has a linguistic framework. This is a sensory-motor space consisting of the evolution of the joint angles of the human body in movement. The space of human activity has its own phonemes, morphemes, and sentences. This has implications for conceptual grounding. We present a Human Activity Language (HAL) for symbolic non-arbitrary rep...

Generalization of learned fear has been considered to be critical for our survival. Patients with anxiety problems show overgeneralization of learned fear, as reflected by defensive physiological responses to harmless stimuli. Together with these physiological responses, conscious feeling of fear is a seminal part of emotional process that is directly related to the suffering of anxiety patient...

While much research has elucidated the neurobiology of fear learning, the neural systems supporting the generalization of learned fear are unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show that regions involved in the acquisition of fear support the generalization of fear to stimuli that are similar to a learned threat, but vary in fear intensity value. Behaviorally, subjects...

Models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggest that the hippocampus is key to persistence traumatic memory. Yet very little known about precise changes take place in this structure, nor their relation with PTSD symptoms. Previous studies have mostly used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at low resolutions, making it impossible identify sensitive anatomical landmarks, or compared groups ...

The understanding of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has evolved with the knowledge of behavior, the brain, and their relationship. Modern views of OCD as a neuropsychiatric disorder originated from early lesion studies, with more recent models incorporating detailed neuropsychological findings, such as perseveration in set-shifting tasks, and findings of altered brain structure and functio...