One mechanism that may allow older adults to continue to successfully perform certain cognitive tasks is to allocate more resources than their younger counterparts. Most prior studies have not included individuals beyond their 70s. Here, we investigated whether compensatory increases in neural activity previously observed in cognitively high-performing young-old adults would continue into old-o...

Decisions about novelty/familiarity are critical in determining whether or not information should be attended to, and possibly encoded, for long-term storage. We have reported that fetal and neonatal rats exhibit an increase in orofacial movements (e.g., perseverative mouthing and mouth movements, and licks) upon tasting saccharin (SAC), if it was experienced previously. E19 rat fetuses can acq...

Many electrophysiological studies of infrequent target detection have been performed using ‘oddball’ paradigm in which subjects were required to detect and respond to infrequent target events embedded in a series of repetitive (frequent) events. The oddball tasks have been known to elicit prominent component of event-related potentials (ERPs) called P3, which occurs about 300 ms after the infre...

In this paper we briefly describe Novelty and Adaptive Novelty, two high-performance, stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms for SAT. Based on the WalkSAT architecture, these algorithms combine search intensification and diversification feautures that lead to good peformance on a broad range of SAT instances. The performance of the Novelty algorithm critically depends on the setting of a soca...

We manipulated categorical typicality and the presence of conflicting information as participants categorized multifeatured artificial animals. In Experiment 1, rule-irrelevant features were correlated with particular categories during training. In the test phase, participants applied a one-dimensional rule to stimuli with rule-irrelevant features that were category-congruent, category-incongru...

We adopt the following rules: p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p6, p, p7 denote points of E2 T and a, b, c, r, s denote real numbers. Next we state four propositions: (1) If sin](p1, p2, p3) = sin](p4, p5, p6) and cos](p1, p2, p3) = cos](p4, p5, p6), then ](p1, p2, p3) = ](p4, p5, p6). (2) sin](p1, p2, p3) = −sin](p3, p2, p1). (3) cos](p1, p2, p3) = cos](p3, p2, p1). (4) ](p1, p4, p2)+](p2, p4, p3) = ](p1, ...

Whereas neuroimaging studies of healthy subjects have demonstrated an association between the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and cognitive control functions, including response monitoring and error detection, lesion studies are sparse and have produced mixed results. Due to largely normal behavioral test results in two patients with medial prefrontal lesions, a hypothesis has been advanced cla...

We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (erfMRI) techniques to examine the cerebral sites involved with target detection and novelty processing of auditory stimuli. Consistent with the results from a recent erfMRI study in the visual modality, target processing was associated with activation bilaterally in the anterior superior temporal gyrus, inferior and middle frontal gyr...

Electrophysiological and hemodynamical responses of the brain allow investigation of the neural origins of human attention. We review attention-related brain responses from auditory and visual tasks employing oddball and novelty paradigms. Dipole localization and intracranial recordings as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging reveal multiple areas involved in generating and modulating ...

In Parkinson's disease (PD), apathy (or loss of motivation) is frequent. Nevertheless, the contribution of attentional disorders to its genesis is still not clearly known. We want to determine the relation existing between apathy and attentional disorders by using P300a (or novelty P3) as a marker of the attentional process. The study included 25 patients (13 women and 12 men) with PD for whom ...