Nightmare disorder is a prevalent parasomnia characterized by vivid and highly unpleasant dream experiences during night time sleep. The neural background of disturbed dreaming was proposed to be associated with impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning during REM sleep. We hypothesized that the impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning in subjects with frequent nightmares would...

BACKGROUND The anterior cingulate cognitive division (ACcd) plays a central role in attentional processing by: 1) modulating stimulus selection (i.e., focusing attention) and/or 2) mediating response selection. We hypothesized that ACcd dysfunction might therefore contribute to producing core features of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), namely inattention and impulsivity. ADHD s...

In this study we have attempted to define the neural circuits differentially activated by cognitive interference. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify areas of the brain that are activated by the Stroop word-color task in two experiments. In the first experiment, we used infrequent, incongruent colored word stimuli to elicit strong Stroop interference (...

A longstanding debate in psychology concerns the relation between handedness and cognitive functioning. The present study aimed to contribute to this debate by comparing performance of right- and non-right-handers on verbal and spatial Stroop tasks. Previous studies have shown that non-right-handers have better inter-hemispheric interaction and greater access to right hemisphere processes. On t...

BACKGROUND Hypnosis has been used clinically for hundreds of years and is primarily a phenomenon involving attentive receptive concentration. Cognitive science has not fully exploited hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion as experimental tools. This study was designed to determine whether a hypnotic suggestion to hinder lexical processing could modulate the Stroop effect. METHODS Behavioral Stroop...

Previously, it has been shown experimentally that the psychophysical law known as Piéron's Law holds for color intensity and that the size of the effect is additive with that of Stroop condition (Stafford et al., 2011). According to the additive factors method (Donders, 1868-1869/1969; Sternberg, 1998), additivity is assumed to indicate independent and discrete processing stages. We present com...

For the last 80 years, the Stroop task has been used to test theories of attention and cognitive control and it has been applied in many clinical settings. Most theories posit that the overwhelming power of written words overcomes strict instructions to focus on print color and ignore the word. Recent evidence suggests that trials in the Stroop task could in fact be a mixture of reading trials ...

Non-invasive monitoring of human brain function by Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been applied to study of brain oxygenation and metabolism. In this study, we aimed to investigate the functional connectivity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during a modified version of the color-word matching Stroop task. Stroop task, which requires responding to a particular stimulus dimension...

This is a report on a case of color-taste synesthesia exhibited by an artist painter. This case is unique in that it is not common for color to appear as an inducer or taste as a concurrent. A comprehensive description of this particular case of synesthesia is provided first. The application and results of consistency, psychophysical, and Stroop tests are presented later. Finally, the difficult...