Does Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Really Increase Impulsiveness? Delay and Probability Discounting in Patients with Focal Lesions.

If the tendency to discount rewards reflects individuals' general level of impulsiveness, then the discounting of delayed and probabilistic rewards should be negatively correlated: The less a person is able to wait for delayed rewards, the more they should take chances on receiving probabilistic rewards. It has been suggested that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) increases individuals' impulsiveness, but both intertemporal choice and risky choice have only recently been assayed in the same patients with vMPFC damage. Here, we assess both delay and probability discounting in individuals with vMPFC damage (n = 8) or with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage (n = 10), and in age- and education-matched controls (n = 30).

The effect of repetition on pronoun resolution in patients with memory impairment.

Referring to things in the world - - is a central component of language. Understanding reference requires the listener to keep track of the unfolding discourse history while integrating multiple sources of information to interpret the speech stream as it unfolds in time. Pronouns are a common way to establish reference.

Narrative construction is intact in episodic amnesia.

Autobiographical remembering and future imagining overlap in their underlying psychological and neurological mechanisms. The hippocampus and surrounding regions within the medial temporal lobes (MTL), known for their role in forming and maintaining autobiographical episodic memories, are also thought to play an essential role in fictitious and future constructions. Amnesic individuals with bilateral hippocampal damage cannot reconstruct their past personal experiences and also have severe deficits in the ability to construct coherent fictitious or future narratives.

"Social" Neuroscience: Leveraging Social Media to Increase Student Engagement and Public Understanding of Neuroscience.

Neuroscience is young and still developing. It is quickly adapting to a number of emerging changes in science and education. Not only have neuroscientists been at the forefront of the open access publishing movement, but many prominent neuroscientists continue to push towards making science more accessible and understandable to the broader public.

Moral judgment in episodic amnesia.

To investigate the role of episodic thought about the past and future in moral judgment, we administered a well-established moral judgment battery to individuals with hippocampal damage and deficits in episodic thought (insert Greene et al. 2001). Healthy controls select deontological answers in high-conflict moral scenarios more frequently when they vividly imagine themselves in the scenarios than when they imagine scenarios abstractly, at some personal remove.

What relates newspaper, definite, and clothing? An article describing deficits in convergent problem solving and creativity following hippocampal damage.

Creativity relies on a diverse set of cognitive processes associated with distinct neural correlates, and one important aspect of creativity, divergent thinking, has been associated with the hippocampus. However, hippocampal contributions to another important aspect of creativity, convergent problem solving, have not been investigated. We tested the necessity of hippocampus for convergent problem solving using a neuropsychological method.

A new method for assessing the impact of medial temporal lobe amnesia on the characteristics of generated autobiographical events.

Constructing autobiographical events involves an initial phase of event selection, in which a memory or imagined future event is initially brought to mind, followed by a phase of elaboration, in which an individual accesses detailed knowledge specific to the event. While considerable research demonstrates the importance of the medial temporal lobes (MTL) in the later phase, its role in initial event selection is unknown. The present study is the first to investigate the role of the MTL in event selection by assessing whether individuals with MTL lesions select qualitatively different events for remembering and imagining than matched control participants.

Specific, personally meaningful cues can benefit episodic prospection in medial temporal lobe amnesia.

Objectives: To determine whether severity of episodic prospection impairment in medial temporal lobe (MTL) amnesia is reduced by the types of cues that are used to elicit personal future episodes and, if so, whether episodic memory impairment is similarly affected.

Design: Multiple case study of five individuals with MTL amnesia and healthy control participants.

Methods: Participants were administered two tests of episodic prospection: A commonly used Galton-Crovitz task that uses generic cues (e.

Differential contributions of hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex to self-projection and self-referential processing.

Converging evidence points to a neural network that supports a range of abilities including remembering the past, thinking about the future, and introspecting about oneself and others. Neuroimaging studies find hippocampal activation during event construction tasks, and patients with hippocampal amnesia are impaired in their ability to (re)construct events of the past and the future. Neuroimaging studies of constructed experiences similarly implicate the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but it remains unknown whether the mPFC is critical for such processes.

The student as teacher: reflections on collaborative learning in a senior seminar.

A major influence on education since the 1950's has been Bloom's Taxonomy, a classification of learning objectives across multiple domains meant to educate the whole student (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001). Although it has influenced educational pedagogy in primary education, higher education remains, in antiquity, heavily lecture based; viewing the instructor as an expert who professes their vast knowledge to their students. However, when students serve as instructor, it is difficult to apply this traditional view to the college classroom.

The Aging Neighborhood: Phonological Density in Naming.

Aging affects the ability to retrieve words for production, despite maintainence of lexical knowledge. In this study, we investigate the influence of lexical variables on picture naming accuracy and latency in adults ranging in age from 22 to 86 years. In particular, we explored the influence of phonological neighborhood density, which has been shown to exert competitive effects on word recognition, but to facilitate word production, a finding with implications for models of the lexicon.

Hippocampal amnesia disrupts creative thinking.

Creativity requires the rapid combination and recombination of existing mental representations to create novel ideas and ways of thinking. The hippocampal system, through its interaction with neocortical storage sites, provides a relational database necessary for the creation, updating, maintenance, and juxtaposition of mental representations used in service of declarative memory. Given this functionality, we hypothesized that hippocampus would play a critical role in creative thinking.

Hippocampal contributions to language: evidence of referential processing deficits in amnesia.

A growing body of work suggests the hippocampus contributes to a variety of cognitive domains beyond its traditional role in memory. We propose that the hippocampus, in its capacity for relational binding, representational flexibility, and online maintenance and integration of multimodal relational representations, is a key contributor to language processing. Here we test the hypothesis that the online interpretation of pronouns is hippocampus-dependent.

Intact discourse cohesion and coherence following bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Discourse cohesion and coherence give communication its continuity providing the grammatical and lexical links that hold an utterance or text together and give it meaning. Researchers often link cohesion and coherence deficits to the frontal lobes by drawing attention to frontal lobe dysfunction in populations where discourse cohesion and coherence deficits are reported and through attribution of these deficits to underlying cognitive impairments putatively associated with the frontal lobes. We examined the distinct contribution of a region of the frontal lobes, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), to discourse cohesion and coherence across a range of discourse tasks.

Cohesion, coherence, and declarative memory: Discourse patterns in individuals with hippocampal amnesia.

BACKGROUND: Discourse cohesion and coherence gives our communication continuity. Deficits in cohesion and coherence have been reported in patients with cognitive-communication disorders (e.g.