Naturalistic stimuli reveal a sensitive period in cross modal responses of visual cortex: Evidence from adult-onset blindness.

How do life experiences impact cortical function? In people who are born blind, the "visual" cortices are recruited during nonvisual tasks, such as Braille reading and sound localization. Do visual cortices have a latent capacity to respond to nonvisual information throughout the lifespan? Alternatively, is there a sensitive period of heightened plasticity that makes visual cortex repurposing especially possible during childhood? To gain insight into these questions, we leveraged meaningful naturalistic auditory stimuli to simultaneously engage a broad range of cognitive domains and quantify cross-modal responses across congenitally blind (n = 22), adult-onset blind (vision loss >18 years-of-age, n = 14) and sighted (n = 22) individuals. During fMRI scanning, participants listened to two types of meaningful naturalistic auditory stimuli: excerpts from movies and a spoken narrative.

Neural signatures associated with temporal compression in the verbal retelling of past events.

When we retell our past experiences, we aim to reproduce some version of the original events; this reproduced version is often temporally compressed relative to the original. However, it is currently unclear how this compression manifests in brain activity. One possibility is that a compressed retrieved memory manifests as a neural pattern which is more dissimilar to the original, relative to a more detailed or vivid memory.

Naturalistic Audio-Movies reveal common spatial organization across "visual" cortices of different blind individuals.

Occipital cortices of different sighted people contain analogous maps of visual information (e.g. foveal vs.

Tracking competition and cognitive control during language comprehension with multi-voxel pattern analysis.

To successfully comprehend a sentence that contains a homonym, readers must select the ambiguous word's context-appropriate meaning. The outcome of this process is influenced both by top-down contextual support and bottom-up, word-specific characteristics. We examined how these factors jointly affect the neural signatures of lexical ambiguity resolution.

Semantic variability predicts neural variability of object concepts.

The prevailing approach to the neuroscientific study of concepts is to characterize the neural pattern evoked by a given concept, averaging over any variation that might occur upon multiple retrieval attempts (e.g., across time, tasks, or people).

Visual statistical learning is not reliably modulated by selective attention to isolated events.

Recent studies of visual statistical learning (VSL) have indicated that the visual system can automatically extract the temporal and spatial relationships between objects. We report several attempts to replicate and extend earlier work (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 552-564, 2005) in which observers performed a cover task on one of two interleaved stimulus sets, resulting in the learning of temporal relationships that occurred in the attended stream, but not those present in the unattended stream. Across four experiments, we exposed observers to similar or identical familiarization protocols, directing attention to one of two interleaved stimulus sets; afterward, we assessed the VSL efficacy for both sets using either implicit response time measures or explicit familiarity judgments.