Interference between concurrent tasks was used to investigate the brain basis of capacity limitations apparent when children encode information. Seventy-three right-handed children in Grades 1-4 engaged in speeded unilateral finger tapping while encoding a variable number of faces or numbers for subsequent recognition testing. With both face and number encoding, tapping rate decreased as memory...

Sensory experience is known to shape the maturation of cortical circuits during development. A paradigmatic example is the effect of monocular deprivation on ocular dominance of visual cortical neurons. Although visual cortical plasticity has been widely studied since its initial discovery by Hubel and Wiesel >40 years ago, the description of the underlying molecular mechanisms has lagged behin...

To examine the functional interactions between the color and form pathways in the primate visual cortex, we have examined the functional connectivity between pairs of color oriented and nonoriented V1 and V2 neurons in Macaque monkeys. Optical imaging maps for color selectivity, orientation preference, and ocular dominance were used to identify specific functional compartments within V1 and V2 ...

It has been hypothesized that cerebral lateralization can significantly enhance cognition and that this was one of the primary selective forces shaping its wide-spread evolution amongst vertebrate taxa. Here, we tested this hypothesis by examining the link between cerebral lateralization and numerical discrimination. Guppies, Poecilia reticulata, were sorted into left, right and non-lateralized...

Perceptual learning is an important means for the brain to maintain its agility in a dynamic environment. Top-down focal attention, which selects task-relevant stimuli against competing ones in the background, is known to control and select what is learned in adults. Still unknown, is whether the adult brain is able to learn highly visible information beyond the focus of top-down attention. If ...

BACKGROUND The human cerebrum is asymmetrical, consisting of two hemispheres with differing functions. Recent epidemiological and neurobiological research has shed new light on the development of the cerebral lateralization of motor processes, including handedness. In this article, we present these findings from a medical perspective. METHOD We selectively searched the PubMed online database ...

We model a two-eye visual environment composed of natural images and study its effect on single cell synaptic modification. In particular, we study the effect of binocular cortical misalignment on receptive field formation after eye opening. We show that binocular misalignment affects principal component analysis (PCA) and Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) learning in different ways. For the...

The study on structural brain asymmetries in healthy individuals plays an important role in our understanding of the factors that modulate cognitive specialization in the brain. Here, we used fiber tractography to reconstruct the left and right hemispheric networks of a large cohort of 346 healthy participants (20-86 years) and performed a graph theoretical analysis to investigate this brain la...

The hypnosis community may be buying into a neuroscience fad concerning brain laterality. Accustomed to deflating folkloric claims about hypnosis, researchers and practitioners of hypnosis have come to appreciate the danger of lingering myths and the importance of dispelling legends. Tales are ubiquitous, however, and claims relating to the left or right hemispheres require both context and sub...