The aim of our study was to test for lateralization of magnetic compass orientation in pigeons. Having shown that pigeons are capable of learning magnetic compass directions in an operant task, we wanted to know whether the brain hemispheres contribute differently and how the lateralization pattern relates to findings in other avian species. Birds that had learnt to locate food in an operant ch...

Neglect and related phenomena, as anosognosia for hemiplegia and somatoparaphrenia, are often associated to right-hemisphere lesions. These deficits can be alleviated by caloric vestibular stimulation, but little is known about the efficacy of this physiological intervention on neglect following left-hemisphere lesions. Here we report the case of an ambidextrous left brain-damaged patient with ...

Six experiments explored hemispheric memory differences in a patient who had undergone complete corpus callosum resection. The right hemisphere was better able than the left to reject new events similar to originally presented materials of several types, including abstract visual forms, faces, and categorized lists of words. Although the left hemisphere is capable of mental manipulation, imagin...

Decades of research focusing on the neurophysiological underpinnings related to global-local processing of hierarchical stimuli have associated global processing with the right hemisphere and local processing with the left hemisphere. The current experiment sought to expand this research by testing the causal contributions of hemisphere activation to global-local processing. To manipulate hemis...

We investigated whether left-hemisphere arachnoid cysts lead to reorganization of the language function using PET. A group analysis demonstrated that patients showed no more right-hemisphere activation than a matched control group. Several patients had clear language localizations in the left hemisphere during language comprehension; none of the patients showed right-hemisphere activation. We c...

To explain the prevalence of unilateral spatial neglect in patients with right brain damage, Heilman et al have suggested that the attentional neurons of the right parietal lobe might have bilateral receptive fields, whereas the homologous cells of the left hemisphere would have strictly contralateral receptive fields. One implication of this theory is that patients with right brain damage shou...

In a patient with damage to the right occipital lobe and to the splenium of the corpus callosum, an incomplete colour anopia in the left upper quadrants and a colour anomia was found for the complete left visual hemifield beyond 2 degrees eccentricity. The patient had no difficulty in recognising coloured targets when presented in the periphery of the left visual hemifield and in the foveal reg...

Previous studies with brain-injured patients have suggested that language abilities are necessary for complex problem-solving, even when tasks are non-verbal. In the current study, we tested this notion by analyzing behavioral and neuroimaging data from a large group of left-hemisphere stroke patients (n=107) suffering from a range of language impairment from none to severe. Patients were teste...