Vaccination is a major strategy to control a viral pandemic. Simple behavioral interventions that might boost vaccine responses have yet to be identified. We conducted meta-analyses to summarize the evidence linking the amount of sleep obtained in the days surrounding vaccination to antibody response in healthy adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has been hypothesised that the human neurocognitive architecture may include a perceptual ratio processing system (RPS) that supports symbolic fraction understanding. In the present study, we aimed to provide further evidence for the existence of the RPS by exploring whether individuals with a range of math skills are indeed perceptually sensitive to non-symbolic ratio magnitudes. We also aimed to test to what extent the RPS may underlie symbolic fraction processing in those individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe () gene was identified in 2002 as responsible for XLAG syndrome, a lissencephaly characterized by an almost complete absence of cortical GABAergic interneurons, and for milder forms of X-linked Intellectual Disability (ID) without apparent brain abnormalities. The most frequent mutation found in the gene, a duplication of 24 base pairs (c.429_452dup24) in exon 2, results in a recognizable syndrome in which patients present ID without primary motor impairment, but with a very specific upper limb distal motor apraxia associated with a pathognomonic hand-grip, described as developmental Limb Kinetic Apraxia (LKA).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDo mathematical symbols evoke spatial representations? Although behavioral studies have long demonstrated interactions between space and the processing of Arabic digits, how to interpret these results remains controversial. Here, we tested whether activity in regions supporting spatial processing contributes to the processing of symbols conveying fundamental arithmetic concepts-such as operation signs-even in the absence of associated digits. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that merely perceiving a "+" sign triggers activity in brain regions that support the orienting of spatial attention in adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like "The pianist played Mozart sonatas" is interpreted, as "The pianist did play Mozart sonatas" have been given two different analyses. Neo-Griceans (NG) claim that this interpretation is based on lexical scales (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is now general agreement about the optionality of scalar implicatures: the pragmatic interpretation will be accessed depending on the context relative to which the utterance is interpreted. The question, then, is what makes a context upper- (vs. lower-) bounding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Res Methods
February 2017
Research in cognitive neuroscience has shown that brain structures serving perceptual, emotional, and motor processes are also recruited during the understanding of language when it refers to emotion, perception, and action. However, the exact linguistic and extralinguistic conditions under which such language-induced activity in modality-specific cortex is triggered are not yet well understood. The purpose of this study is to introduce a simple experimental technique that allows for the online measure of language-induced activity in motor structures of the brain.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimaging studies have contributed to a major advance in understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms underpinning deductive reasoning. However, the dynamics of cognitive events associated with inference making have been largely neglected. Using electroencephalography, the present study aims at describing the rapid sequence of processes involved in performing transitive inference (A B; B C therefore "A C"; with AB meaning "A is to the left of B").
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrowing evidence suggests that semantic knowledge is represented in distributed neural networks that include modality-specific structures. Here, we examined the processes underlying the acquisition of words from different semantic categories to determine whether the emergence of visual- and action-based categories could be tracked back to their acquisition. For this, we applied correspondence analysis (CA) to ERPs recorded at various moments during acquisition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
April 2014
Many neurocognitive studies on the role of motor structures in action-language processing have implicitly adopted a "dictionary-like" framework within which lexical meaning is constructed on the basis of an invariant set of semantic features. The debate has thus been centered on the question of whether motor activation is an integral part of the lexical semantics (embodied theories) or the result of a post-lexical construction of a situation model (disembodied theories). However, research in psycholinguistics show that lexical semantic processing and context-dependent meaning construction are narrowly integrated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecognition of social hierarchy is a key feature that helps us navigate through our complex social environment. Neuroimaging studies have identified brain structures involved in the processing of hierarchical stimuli but the precise temporal dynamics of brain activity associated with such processing remains largely unknown. Here, we used electroencephalography to examine the effect of social hierarchy on neural responses elicited by faces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The c.429_452dup24 of the ARX gene is a rare genetic anomaly, leading to X-Linked Intellectual Disability without brain malformation. While in certain cases c.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSuccessful non-verbal social interaction between human beings requires dynamic and efficient encoding of others' gestures. Our study aimed at identifying neural markers of social interaction and goal variations in a non-verbal task. For this, we recorded simultaneously the electroencephalogram from two participants (dual-EEG), an actor and an observer, and their arm/hand kinematics in a real face-to-face paradigm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Kawasaki disease is an acute and time-limited systemic vasculitis primarily affecting young children.
Patient: We describe an 18-month-old girl with Kawasaki disease who developed cerebral infarction following complete occlusion of her right internal carotid artery.
Results: The occlusion occurred 10 days after the onset of fever, while she was on high-dose aspirin, and the day after she received intravenous immunoglobulin treatment.
The combined knowledge of word meanings and grammatical rules does not allow a listener to grasp the intended meaning of a speaker's utterance. Pragmatic inferences on the part of the listener are also required. The present work focuses on the processing of ironic utterances (imagine a slow day being described as "really productive") because these clearly require the listener to go beyond the linguistic code.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCharacterizing the neural substrate of reasoning has been investigated with regularity over the last 10 years or so while relying on measures that come primarily from positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. To some extent, these techniques—as well as those from electroencephalography—have shown that time course is equally worthwhile for revealing the way reasoning processes work in the brain. In this work, we employ magnetoencephalography while investigating Modus Ponens (If P then Q; P//Therefore, Q) in order to simultaneously derive time course and the source of this fundamental logical inference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuropsychologia
September 2008
It is more difficult for reasoners to detect that the letter-number pair H7 verifies the conditional rule If there is not a T then there is not a 4 than to detect that it verifies the rule If there is an H then there is a 7. In prior work [Prado, J., & Noveck, I.
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