Insulation for daydreams: a role for tonic norepinephrine in the facilitation of internally guided thought.

Although consciousness can be brought to bear on both perceptual and internally generated information, little is known about how these different cognitive modes are coordinated. Here we show that between-participant variance in thoughts unrelated to the task being performed (known as task unrelated thought, TUT) is associated with longer response times (RT) when target presentation occurs during periods when baseline Pupil Diameter (PD) is increased. As behavioral interference due to high baseline PD can reflect increased tonic activity in the norepinephrine system (NE), these results might implicate high tonic NE activity in the facilitation of TUTs.

Medicine for the wandering mind: mind wandering in medical practice.

Context: Mind wandering--defined as a cognitive focus on information that is unrelated to immediate sensory input or the task at hand--is a ubiquitous characteristic of the human condition. When it occurs, the integrity of a wide range of cognitive skills can be compromised.

Objectives: The current paper describes the phenomenon of mind wandering, explores its potential role in medical practice and considers how the education system may profitably control this ubiquitous cognitive state.

Robotic movement preferentially engages the action observation network.

As humans, we gather a wide range of information about other people from watching them move. A network of parietal, premotor, and occipitotemporal regions within the human brain, termed the action observation network (AON), has been implicated in understanding others' actions by means of an automatic matching process that links observed and performed actions. Current views of the AON assume a matching process biased towards familiar actions; specifically, those performed by conspecifics and present in the observer's motor repertoire.

The NIH experience in first advancing fMRI.

The introduction of functional MRI at NIH in 1992 was the outcome of research goals first formulated by Turner in 1983. Between 1988 and 1990, Turner worked at NIH on actively-shielded gradient coils and the implementation of EPI-based techniques, especially diffusion-weighted EPI. His work on hypoxia in cat brain in 1990 directly inspired Ken Kwong's demonstration of BOLD contrast in humans at MGH in May 1991.

Temporal dynamics of prediction error processing during reward-based decision making.

Adaptive decision making depends on the accurate representation of rewards associated with potential choices. These representations can be acquired with reinforcement learning (RL) mechanisms, which use the prediction error (PE, the difference between expected and received rewards) as a learning signal to update reward expectations. While EEG experiments have highlighted the role of feedback-related potentials during performance monitoring, important questions about the temporal sequence of feedback processing and the specific function of feedback-related potentials during reward-based decision making remain.

Ambiguous words in sentences: brain indices for native and non-native disambiguation.

In the present study, we compare how native speakers and second language learners process homonyms (such as bank and jam) in sentence context during a late processing phase that involves selection of the appropriate meaning. With both participant groups, we conducted a combined reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) lexical decision experiment with a long stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 800 ms. Related primes were homonyms at the end of sentences with a context biasing one of the homonym meanings, and targets reflected the contextually appropriate or inappropriate meaning.

The role of intact frontostriatal circuits in error processing.

The basal ganglia have been suggested to play a key role in performance monitoring and resulting behavioral adjustments. It is assumed that the integration of prefrontal and motor cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuits provides contextual information to the motor anterior cingulate cortex regions to enable their function in performance monitoring. So far, direct evidence is missing, however.

Who's in control? Proficiency and L1 influence on L2 processing.

We report three reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) semantic priming lexical decision experiments that explore the following in relation to L1 activation during L2 processing: (1) the role of L2 proficiency, (2) the role of sentence context, and (3) the locus of L1 activations (orthographic vs. semantic). All experiments used German (L1) homonyms translated into English (L2) to form prime-target pairs (pine-jaw for Kiefer) to test whether the L1 caused interference in an all-L2 experiment.