Evidence from behavioral and physiological studies suggests attentional weighting of stimulus information from different sources, according to task demands. We investigated the adoption of task-specific attentional sets by administering a flanker task, which required responding to a centrally presented letter while ignoring two adjacent letters, and a same-different judgment task, which require...

Recent studies have shown that place cells in the hippocampus possess firing fields that repeat in physically similar, parallel environments. These results imply that it should be difficult for animals to distinguish parallel environments at a behavioral level. To test this, we trained rats on a novel odor-location task in an environment with four parallel compartments which had previously been...

The present study investigates the impact of meaningful input on L2 learners’ vocabulary use and their fluency in oral performance (immediate repeat tasks), as well whether effects are mediated by prior knowledge working memory. Ninety university students learning English a foreign language were randomly assigned to one three groups: (N = 29), repetition 32), no-input (i.e., baseline group) 29)...

The neural response to stimulus repetition is not uniform across brain regions, stimulus modalities, or task contexts. For instance, it has been observed in many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that sometimes stimulus repetition leads to a relative reduction in neural activity (repetition suppression), whereas in other cases repetition results in a relative increase in acti...

Our primary goal was to develop and validate a task that could provide evidence about how humans learn praxis gestures, such as those involving the use of tools. To that end, we created a video-based task in which subjects view a model performing novel, meaningless one-handed actions with kinematics similar to praxis gestures. Subjects then imitated the movements with their right hand. Trials w...

The neural response to stimulus repetition is not uniform across brain regions, stimulus modalities, or task contexts. For instance, it has been observed in many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that sometimes stimulus repetition leads to a relative reduction in neural activity (repetition suppression), whereas in other cases repetition results in a relative increase in acti...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that repetition priming of visual objects is typically accompanied by a reduction in activity for repeated compared to new stimuli (repetition suppression). However, the spatial distribution and direction (suppression vs. enhancement) of neural repetition effects can depend on the pre-experimental familiarity of stimuli. The first ...

We compared single-cell activities in perirhinal cortex (PRh) as well as adjacent visual cortex (area TE) across two tasks. One task required the monkey to identify any stimulus repetition within a sequence of object stimuli. In the other task, the same stimuli were presented, but the monkey didn't have to remember them. PRh responses during the object-memory task were elevated relative to thos...

The pattern of masked repetition priming effects for word and nonword targets differs across tasks: Masked-priming effects in lexical decision occur for positive responses (i.e., words), but not for negative responses (nonwords), whereas masked-priming effects in the cross-case same-different task occur for positive responses (same), but not for negative responses (different)--regardless of lex...