What type of inhibition underpins performance on Luria's Fist-Edge-Palm task?

Objective: The Fist-Edge-Palm task is a motor sequencing task believed to be sensitive to frontal lobe impairment. The present study aimed to investigate the inhibitory processes underlying successful execution of this task.

Method: Seventy-two healthy participants were asked to perform the Fist-Edge-Palm task paced at 120 bpms, 60 bpms and self-paced.

The contribution of visual attention and declining verbal memory abilities to age-related route learning deficits.

Our ability to learn unfamiliar routes declines in typical and atypical ageing. The reasons for this decline, however, are not well understood. Here we used eye-tracking to investigate how ageing affects people's ability to attend to navigationally relevant information and to select unique objects as landmarks.

'Well I'm still the Diva!' Enabling people with dementia to express their identity through graffiti arts: Innovative practice.

This article reports on a pilot study that investigated the use of graffiti arts as a medium for promoting self-expression in people with dementia. Two people with dementia attended a series of workshops with a graffiti artist where they explored their feelings of changing identity following their dementia diagnoses. As part of the workshops, they were encouraged to develop a personal 'tag' or signature to portray their sense of identity and a piece of street art to express 'their message'.

Emotion-based learning: insights from the Iowa Gambling Task.

Interest in the cognitive and/or emotional basis of complex decision-making, and the related phenomenon of emotion-based learning, has been heavily influenced by the Iowa Gambling Task. A number of psychological variables have been investigated as potentially important in understanding emotion-based learning. This paper reviews the extent to which humans are explicitly aware of how we make such decisions; the biasing influence of pre-existing emotional labels; and the extent to which emotion-based systems are anatomically and functionally independent of episodic memory.

Neural priming in human frontal cortex: multiple forms of learning reduce demands on the prefrontal executive system.

Past experience is hypothesized to reduce computational demands in PFC by providing bottom-up predictive information that informs subsequent stimulus-action mapping. The present fMRI study measured cortical activity reductions ("neural priming"/"repetition suppression") during repeated stimulus classification to investigate the mechanisms through which learning from the past decreases demands on the prefrontal executive system. Manipulation of learning at three levels of representation-stimulus, decision, and response-revealed dissociable neural priming effects in distinct frontotemporal regions, supporting a multiprocess model of neural priming.