Imaging the impossible: an fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks.

Understanding causal relationships and violations of those relationships is fundamental to learning about the world around us. Over time some of these relationships become so firmly established that they form part of an implicit belief system about what is possible and impossible in the world. Previous studies investigating the neural correlates of violations of learned relationships have focused on relationships that were task-specific and probabilistic.

Gaze strategies during planning in first-episode psychosis.

Eye movements were measured during the performance of a computerized Tower of London task to specify the source of planning abnormalities in patients with 1st-episode schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Subjects viewed 2 arrays of colored balls in the upper and lower parts of the screen. They were asked to plan the shortest sequence of moves required to rearrange the balls in the lower screen to match the upper arrangement.

Revisiting previously searched locations in visual neglect: role of right parietal and frontal lesions in misjudging old locations as new.

Right-hemisphere patients with left neglect often demonstrate abnormal visual search, re-examining stimuli to the right while ignoring those to the left. But re-fixations alone do not reveal if patients misjudge whether they have searched a location before. Here, we not only tracked the eye movements of 16 neglect patients during search, but also asked them to click a response button only when they judged they were fixating a target for the very first time.