While listening to music, we immediately detect 'wrong' tones that do not match our expectations based on the prior context. This study aimed to determine whether such expectations can occur preattentively, as indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs), and whether these are modulated by attentional processes. To this end, we recorded ERPs in nonmusicians while they were presented with unfamili...

When subjects read an semantically unexpected word, the brain electrical activity shows a negative deflection at about 400 msec in comparison with the response to an expected word. In order to study the brain systems related to this effect we mapped it with a dense (64-channel) electrode array and two reference-independent measures, one estimating the average potential gradients and the other r...

INTRODUCTION Clinicians are confronted with considerable difficulties in diagnosing conversion disorders such as dissociative paraplegia. In the literature, there is still no sufficient evidence regarding a typical pattern or general characteristics for this neuropsychiatric syndrome. Over the last decades case reports have described patients with similar personality traits, psychopathological ...

The originality of this study is to examine the processing of pitch and duration in music reading, using both electrophysiological and behavioral methods. Specifically, it was of interest to determine whether pitch and duration in music reading are processed independently or jointly. A probe, comprising a key and time signature was presented, and participants were required to compute the tonic ...

Three eye movement experiments investigated the interaction between contextual and lexical focus cues during reading. Context was used to focus on either the indirect or direct object of a double object construction, which was followed by a remnant continuation that formed either a congruous or incongruous contrast with the contextually-focused object. Experiment 1 demonstrated that remnants we...

The meaning of a visual scene influences the identification of visual objects embedded in it. We investigated the nature and time course of scene effects on object identification by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and response times (RTs). In three experiments, participants identified objects within a scene that were either semantically congruous (e.g., a pot in a kitchen) or in...

The present study investigates whether knowledge about the intentional relationship between gesture and speech influences controlled processes when integrating the two modalities at comprehension. Thirty-five adults watched short videos of gesture and speech that conveyed semantically congruous and incongruous information. In half of the videos, participants were told that the two modalities we...

The human brain is constantly predicting the auditory environment by representing sequential similarities and extracting temporal regularities. It has been proposed that simple auditory regularities are extracted at lower stations of the auditory cortex and more complex ones at other brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. Deviations from auditory regularities elicit a family of early neg...