Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Speech comprehension has been proposed to critically rely on oscillatory cortical tracking, that is, phase alignment of neural oscillations to the slow temporal modulations (envelope) of speech. Speech-brain entrainment is readjusted over time as transient events (edges) in speech lead to speech-brain phase realignment. Auditory behavioral research...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Body awareness is constructed by signals originating from within and outside the body. How do these apparently divergent signals converge? We developed a signal detection task to study the neural convergence and divergence of interoceptive and somatosensory signals. Participants focused on either cardiac or tactile events and reported their presenc...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
There is strong evidence that neuronal bases for language processing are remarkably similar for sign and spoken languages. However, as meanings and linguistic structures of sign languages are coded in movement and space and decoded through vision, differences are also present, predominantly in occipitotemporal and parietal areas, such as superior p...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Grasping actions are directed not only toward objects we see but also toward objects we both see and touch (multisensory grasping). In this latter case, the integration of visual and haptic inputs improves movement performance compared to each sense alone. This performance advantage could be due to the integration of all the redundant positional an...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
While several theories assume that responses to hypnotic suggestions can be implemented without executive intentions, the metacognitive class of theories postulate that the behaviors produced by hypnotic suggestions are intended and the accompanying feeling of involuntariness is only a consequence of strategically not being aware of the intention. ...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Congenital aphantasia is a recently characterized variation of experience defined by the inability to form voluntary visual imagery, in individuals who are otherwise high performing. Because of this specific deficit to visual imagery, individuals with aphantasia serve as an ideal group for probing the nature of representations in visual memory, par...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
A key symptom of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is difficulty interacting socially with others. Social cognition problems in FTD include impaired emotion processing and theory of mind difficulties, and whilst these have been studied extensively in sporadic FTD, few studies have investigated them in familial FTD. Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) and ...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Changes in social behavior are recognized as potential symptoms of behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and semantic dementia (SD), yet objective ways to assess these behaviors in natural social situations are lacking. This study takes a truly social (or second-person) approach and examines changes in real-world social behavior in dif...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder mainly defined by reading difficulties. During reading, individuals with dyslexia exhibit hypoactivity in left-lateralized language systems. Lower activity in one brain circuit can be accompanied by greater activity in another, and, here, we examined whether right-hemisphere-based emotional reactivity may b...
Published in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
Semantic control refers to a set of neural and cognitive mechanisms that govern semantic processing and retrieval. Neuroimaging studies have indicated that controlled semantic processing engages the left prefrontal cortex (PFC), yet the functional role of the prefrontal activity in semantic control is poorly understood and was therefore addressed i...
