Impact of social knowledge about the speaker on irony understanding: Evidence from neural oscillations.

The aim of the present study was to explore neuronal oscillatory activity during a task of irony understanding. In this task, we manipulated implicit information about the speaker such as occupation stereotypes (i.e.

Role of the supplementary motor area during reproduction of supra-second time intervals: An intracerebral EEG study.

The supplementary motor area (SMA) has been shown to be involved in interval timing but its precise role remains a matter of debate. The present study was aimed at examining, by means of intracerebral EEG recordings, the time course of the activity in this structure, as well as in other functionally connected cortical (frontal, cingulate, insular and temporal) areas, during a visual time reproduction task. Four patients undergoing stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) for presurgical investigation of refractory focal epilepsy were enrolled.

Distortion of time interval reproduction in an epileptic patient with a focal lesion in the right anterior insular/inferior frontal cortices.

This case report on an epileptic patient suffering from a focal lesion at the junction of the right anterior insular cortex (AIC) and the adjacent inferior frontal cortex (IFC) provides the first evidence that damage to this brain region impairs temporal performance in a visual time reproduction task in which participants had to reproduce the presentation duration (3, 5 and 7s) of emotionally-neutral and -negative pictures. Strikingly, as compared to a group of healthy subjects, the AIC/IFC case considerably overestimated reproduction times despite normal variability. The effect was obtained in all duration and emotion conditions.