Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex affects stimulus conflict but not response conflict.

When the human brain encounters a conflict, performance is often impaired. Two tasks that are widely used to induce and measure conflict-related interference are the Eriksen flanker task, whereby the visual target stimulus is flanked by congruent or incongruent distractors, and the Simon task, where the location of the required spatial response is either congruent or incongruent with the location of the target stimulus. Interestingly, both tasks share the characteristic of inducing response conflict but only the flanker task induces stimulus conflict.

Zapping the gap: Reducing the multisensory temporal binding window by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Synchrony among the senses lies at the heart of our possession of a unified conscious perception of the world. However, due to discrepancies in physical and neural information processing from different senses, the brain accommodates a limited range of temporal asynchronies between sensory inputs, i.e.

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: evidence for concurrent activation models.

Nine-month-olds start to perform sequential actions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how they acquire and control such actions. We studied infants' sequential-action control by employing a novel gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm.

From outcome prediction to action selection: developmental change in the role of action-effect bindings.

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and 12-month-olds (and adults) can use acquired action-effect bindings to predict action outcomes but only 12-month-olds (and adults) showed evidence for employing action-effects to select actions.

The role of the noradrenergic system in the exploration-exploitation trade-off: a psychopharmacological study.

Animal research and computational modeling have indicated an important role for the neuromodulatory locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system in the control of behavior. According to the adaptive gain theory, the LC-NE system is critical for optimizing behavioral performance by regulating the balance between exploitative and exploratory control states. However, crucial direct empirical tests of this theory in human subjects have been lacking.

Integrating faces, houses, motion, and action: spontaneous binding across ventral and dorsal processing streams.

Perceiving an event requires the integration of its features across numerous brain maps and modules. Visual object perception is thought to be mediated by a ventral processing stream running from occipital to inferotemporal cortex, whereas most spatial processing and action control is attributed to the dorsal stream connecting occipital, parietal, and frontal cortex. Here we show that integration operates not only on ventral features and objects, such as faces and houses, but also across ventral and dorsal pathways, binding faces and houses to motion and manual action.