Positron emission tomography (PET) experiments have detected blood flow activations in right anterior prefrontal cortex during performance of a word stem cued recall task [3, 38]. Based on findings from a variety of PET studies, the "hemispheric encoding/retrieval asymmetry model" [44] was proposed to explain the role of the frontal lobes in episodic memory. This model asserts that left prefron...

Recent behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies have revealed cross-modal interactions in endogenous spatial attention between vision and audition, plus vision and touch. The present ERP study investigated whether these interactions reflect supramodal attentional control mechanisms, and whether similar cross-modal interactions also exist between audition and touch. Participant...

The very few cognitive training studies targeting an important executive function, set shifting, have reported performance improvements that also generalized to untrained tasks. The present randomized controlled trial extends set shifting training research by comparing previously used cued training with uncued training. A computerized adaptation of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test was utilized a...

The aim of the study was to evaluate whether the presence/absence of visual cues specifying the onset of an upcoming, action-related stimulus modulates pre-stimulus brain activity, associated with the proactive control of goal-directed actions. To this aim we asked 12 subjects to perform an equal probability Go/No-go task with four stimulus configurations in two conditions: (1) uncued, i.e., wi...

Auditory scenes often contain concurrent sound sources, but listeners are typically interested in just one of these and must somehow select it for further processing. One challenge is that real-world sounds such as speech vary over time and as a consequence often cannot be separated or selected based on particular values of their features (e.g., high pitch). Here we show that human listeners ca...

Activation triggered by either observed or imagined actions suggests that the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) provides an action vocabulary that allows us to detect and anticipate basically invariant perceptual states in observed actions. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that the same PMv region is also recruited by nonbiological (abstract) stimulus sequences as long as the temporal...

Changes in regional blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signals in response to brief visual stimuli can exhibit a variety of time-courses. To demonstrate the anatomical distribution of BOLD response shapes during a match to sample task, a formal analysis of their time-courses is presented. An event-related design was used to estimate regional BOLD responses evoked by a cue word, which instructe...

Selective attention can selectively increase sensitivity to particular visual features in order to prioritize behaviorally relevant stimuli. Moreover, neural responses to attended feature values are boosted even at ignored locations. We provide behavioral evidence for involuntary and simultaneous effects of this "global" feature-based attention on visual performance. Observers were cued to atte...