Hunger is the best spice: an fMRI study of the effects of attention, hunger and calorie content on food reward processing in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex.

Research indicates that dysfunctional food reward processing may contribute to pathological eating behaviour. It is widely recognized that both the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are essential parts of the brain's reward circuitry. The aims of this fMRI study were (1) to examine the effects of food deprivation and calorie content on reward processing in the amygdala and the OFC, and (2) to examine whether an explicit evaluation of foods is necessary for OFC, but not amygdalar activity.

The long road to automation: neurocognitive development of letter-speech sound processing.

In transparent alphabetic languages, the expected standard for complete acquisition of letter-speech sound associations is within one year of reading instruction. The neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of letter-speech sound associations have, however, hardly been investigated. The present article describes an ERP study with beginner and advanced readers in which the influence of letters on speech sound processing is investigated by comparing the MMN to speech sounds presented in isolation with the MMN to speech sounds accompanied by letters.

Deviant neurophysiological responses to phonological regularities in speech in dyslexic children.

Developmental dyslexia is strongly associated with a phonological deficit. Yet, implicit phonological processing (in)capacities in dyslexia remain relatively unexplored. Here we use a neurophysiological response sensitive to experience-dependent auditory memory traces, the mismatch negativity (MMN), to investigate implicit phonological processing of natural speech in dyslexic and normally reading children.

Auditory cortical tuning to statistical regularities in phonology.

Objective: Ample behavioral evidence suggests that distributional properties of the language environment influence the processing of speech. Yet, how these characteristics are reflected in neural processes remains largely unknown. The present ERP study investigates neurophysiological correlates of phonotactic probability: the distributional frequency of phoneme combinations.

Developmental dyslexia: ERP correlates of anomalous phonological processing during spoken word recognition.

Ample evidence suggests that developmental dyslexia results from a phonological deficit that may not be reducible to a low-level auditory deficit. Yet, on-line phonological processing (in)capacities in dyslexics remain virtually unexplored, as studies have typically focused on either meta-phonological awareness tasks or, at the other extreme, basic perceptual tasks. The present study investigates event-related potential (ERP) correlates of implicit phonological processing during the recognition of spoken words in dyslexic and normally reading children (7-10 years).