bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cortical Effects of Shifting Letter Position in Letter Strings of Varying Length
Authors: Cornelissen Piers , Tarkiainen Antti , Helenius Päivi , Salmelin Riitta
Published: May 2006

Neuroimaging and lesion studies suggest that occipitotemporal brain areas play a necessary role in recognizing a wide variety of objects, be they faces, letters, numbers, or household items. However, many questions remain regarding the details of exactly what kinds of information are processed by the occipito-temporal cortex. Here, we address this question with respect to reading. Ten healthy adult subjects performed a single word reading task. We used whole-head magnetoencephalography to measure the spatio-temporal dynamics of brain responses, and investigated their sensitivity to: (1) lexicality (defined here as the difference between words and consonant strings), (2) word length, and (3) variation in letter position. Analysis revealed that midline occipital activity around 100 msec, consistent with low-level visual feature analysis, was insensitive to lexicality and variation in letter position, but was slightly affected by string length. Bilateral occipito-temporal activations around 150 msec were insensitive to lexicality and reacted to word length only in the timing (and not strength) of activation. However, vertical shifts in letter position revealed a hemispheric imbalance: The right hemisphere activation increased with the shifts, whereas the opposite pattern was evident in the left hemisphere. The results are discussed in the light of Caramazza and Hillis's (1990) model of early reading.
Pictures and Their Colors: What Do Children Remember?
Authors: Cycowicz Yael M. , Friedman David , Duff Martin
Published: May 2006

Theories regarding children's reliability as witnesses suggest that children are more likely to confuse memories from different sources especially when the sources are highly similar. To investigate the developmental aspects of source retrieval, we measured brain electrical activity from children and adults while they retrieved content and source information. Similar brain responses among the age groups were found when participants were asked to retrieve content information. However, retrieval of source information improved with age and was accompanied by different patterns of brain potentials. The results implicate immaturity of frontal lobe structures in children's difficulty in retrieving source information.
Auditory Spatial Tuning in Late-onset Blindness in Humans
Authors: Fieger Anne , Röder Brigitte , Teder-Sälejärvi Wolfgang , Hillyard Steven A. , Neville Helen J.
Published: May 2006

Blind individuals who lost their sight as older children or adults were compared with normally sighted controls in their ability to focus auditory spatial attention and to localize sounds in a noisy acoustic environment. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants attended to sounds presented in free field from either central or peripheral arrays of speakers with the task of detecting infrequent targets at the attended location. When attending to the central array of speakers, the two groups detected targets equally well, and their spatial tuning curves for both ERPs and target detections were highly similar. By contrast, late blind participants were significantly more accurate than sighted participants at localizing sounds in the periphery. For both groups, the early N1 amplitude to peripheral standard stimuli displayed no significant spatial tuning. In contrast, the amplitude of the later P3 elicited by targets/deviants displayed a more sharply tuned spatial gradient during peripheral attention in the late blind than in the sighted group. These findings were compared with those of a previous study of congenitally blind individuals in the same task [Röder, B., Teder-Sälejärvi, W., Sterr, A., Rösler, F., Hillyard, S. A., & Neville, H. J. Improved auditory spatial tuning in blind humans. Nature, 400, 162–166, 1999]. It was concluded that both late blind and congenitally blind individuals demonstrate an enhanced capability for focusing auditory attention in the periphery, but they do so via different mechanisms: whereas congenitally blind persons demonstrate a more sharply tuned early attentional filtering, manifested in the N1, late blind individuals show superiority in a later stage of target discrimination and recognition, indexed by the P3.
Delayed Response to Animate Implied Motion in Human Motion Processing Areas
Authors: Lorteije Jeannette A. M. , Kenemans J. Leon , Jellema Tjeerd , van der Lubbe Rob H. J. , de Heer Frederiek , van Wezel Richard J. A.
Published: May 2006

Viewing static photographs of objects in motion evokes higher fMRI activation in the human medial temporal complex (MT+) than looking at similar photographs without this implied motion. As MT+ is traditionally thought to be involved in motion perception (and not in form perception), this finding suggests feedback from object-recognition areas onto MT+. To investigate this hypothesis, we recorded extracranial potentials evoked by the sight of photographs of biological agents with and without implied motion. The difference in potential between responses to pictures with and without implied motion was maximal between 260 and 400 msec after stimulus onset. Source analysis of this difference revealed one bilateral, symmetrical dipole pair in the occipital lobe. This area also showed a response to real motion, but approximately 100 msec earlier than the implied motion response. The longer latency of the implied motion response in comparison to the real motion response is consistent with a feedback projection onto MT+ following object recognition in higher-level temporal areas.
“Presemantic” Cognition in Semantic Dementia: Six Deficits in Search of an Explanation
Authors: Patterson Karalyn , Ralph Matthew A. Lambon , Jefferies Elizabeth , Woollams Anna , Jones Roy , Hodges John R. , Rogers Timothy T.
Published: May 2006

On the basis of a theory about the role of semantic knowledge in the recognition and production of familiar words and objects, we predicted that patients with semantic dementia would reveal a specific pattern of impairment on six different tasks typically considered “pre-” or “non-” semantic: reading aloud, writing to dictation, inflecting verbs, lexical decision, object decision, and delayed copy drawing. The prediction was that all tasks would reveal a frequency-by-typicality interaction, with patients performing especially poorly on lower-frequency items with atypical structure (e.g., words with an atypical spelling-to-sound relationship; objects with an atypical feature for their class, such as the hump on a camel, etc). Of 84 critical observations (14 patients performing 6 tasks), this prediction was correct in 84/84 cases; and a single component in a factor analysis accounted for 87% of the variance across seven measures: each patient's degree of impairment on atypical items in the six experimental tasks and a separate composite score reflecting his or her degree of semantic impairment. Errors also consistently conformed to the predicted pattern for both expressive and receptive tasks, with responses reflecting residual knowledge about the typical surface structure of each domain. We argue that these results cannot be explained as associated but unrelated deficits but instead are a principled consequence of a primary semantic impairment.
Age-related Changes in Brain Activity across the Adult Lifespan
Authors: Grady Cheryl L. , Springer Mellanie V. , Hongwanishkul Donaya , McIntosh Anthony R. , Winocur Gordon
Published: May 2006

A number of theories have emerged to explain the well-studied changes in memory that occur with age. Many of these theories invoke mechanisms that have the potential to affect multiple cognitive domains, in addition to memory. Such mechanisms include alterations in attentional or inhibitory function, or dysfunction of specific brain areas, such as the frontal lobes. To gain insight into these mechanisms, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity during encoding and recognition tasks in young, middle-aged, and older adults to identify correlations between age and brain activity across the various tasks. The goal was to see whether these correlations were task-specific or common across tasks, and to determine whether age differences emerged in a linear fashion over the adult years. Across all memory tasks, at both encoding and recognition, linear increases of activity with age were found in areas normally decreased during task performance (e.g., medial frontal and parietal regions), whereas activity in regions with task-related activation (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) decreased with age. These results suggest that there is a gradual, age-related reduction in the ability to suspend non-task-related or “default-mode” activity and engage areas for carrying out memory tasks. Such an alteration in the balance between default-mode and task-related activity could account for increased vulnerability to distraction from irrelevant information, and thereby affect multiple cognitive domains.
Unlocking the Nature of the Phonological–Deep Dyslexia Continuum: The Keys to Reading Aloud Are in Phonology and Semantics
Authors: Crisp Jenni , Lambon Ralph Matthew A.
Published: May 2006

It has been argued that normal reading and acquired dyslexias reflect the role of three underlying primary systems (phonology, semantics, and vision) rather than neural mechanisms dedicated to reading. This proposal is potentially consistent with the suggestion that phonological and deep dyslexia represent variants of a single reading disorder rather than two separate entities. The current study explored this possibility, the nature of any continuum between the disorders, and the possible underlying bases of it. A case series of patients were given an assessment battery to test for the characteristics of phonological and deep dyslexia. The status of their underlying phonological and semantic systems was also investigated. The majority of participants exhibited many of the symptoms associated with deep dyslexia whether or not they made semantic errors. Despite wide variation in word and nonword reading accuracy, there was considerable symptom overlap across the cohort and, thus, no sensible dividing line to separate the participants into distinct groups. The patient data indicated that the deep-phonological continuum might best be characterized according to the severity of the individual's reading impairment rather than in terms of a strict symptom succession. Assessments of phonological and semantic impairments suggested that the integrity of these primary systems underpinned the patients' reading performance. This proposal was supported by eliciting the symptoms of deep-phonological dyslexia in nonreading tasks.
fMRI Measures of Perceptual Filling-in in the Human Visual Cortex
Authors: Mendola J. D. , Conner I. P. , Sharma S. , Bahekar A. , Lemieux S.
Published: May 2006

Filling-in refers to the tendency of stabilized retinal stimuli to fade and become replaced by their background. This phenomenon is a good example of central brain mechanisms that can selectively add or delete information to/from the retinal input. Importantly, such cortical mechanisms may overlap with those that are used more generally in visual perception. In order to identify cortical areas that contribute to perceptual filling-in, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to image activity in the visual cortex while subjects experienced filling-in. Nine subjects viewed an achromatic disc with slightly higher luminance than the background and indicated the presence or absence of filling-in by a keypress. The disc was placed in either the upper or lower left quadrant. Similar high-contrast stimuli were used to map out the retinotopic representation of the disc. Unexpectedly, the lower-field high-contrast stimulus produced more parietal cortex activation than the upper-field condition, indicating preferential representation of the lower field by attentional control mechanisms. During perceptual filling-in, we observed significant contralateral reductions in activation in lower-tier retinotopic areas V1 and V2. In contrast, increased activation was consistently observed in visual areas V3A and V4v, higher-level cortex in the intraparietal sulcus, posterior superior temporal sulcus, and the ventral occipital–temporal region, as well as the pulvinar. The filling-in activation pattern was remarkably similar for both the upper- and lower-field conditions. Behaviorally, filling-in was reported to be easier for the lower visual field, and filling-in periods were longer for the lower than the upper quadrant. We suggest this behavioral asymmetry may be partially due to the preferential parietal representation of the lower field. The results lead us to propose that perceptual filling-in recruits high-level control mechanisms to reconcile competing percepts, and alters the normal image-related signals at the first stages of cortical processing. Moreover, the overall pattern of activation during filling-in resembles that seen in other studies of perceptually bistable stimuli, including binocular rivalry, indicating common control mechanisms.
Single-dose Levodopa Administration and Aging Independently Disrupt Time Production
Authors: Rakitin Brian C. , Scarmeas Nikolaos , Li Tina , Malapani Chariklia , Stern Yaakov
Published: May 2006

We tested the hypothesis that age-related time production deficits are dopamine-mediated. The experiment was conducted double-blind, and with random assignment of 32 healthy aged and 32 healthy young participants to either inert placebo or levodopa (200 mg) groups. The procedure included training participants to produce two target time intervals (6 and 17 sec) in separate blocks, drug/placebo administration, a 1-hr delay, and then delayed free-recall time production retesting without feedback. Participants also performed a speeded choice reaction time (RT) task, as a control for potential dopaminergic and aging effects on attention and psychomotor speed. Results indicate that during retesting, aged participants show duration-dependent timing errors that are larger than those shown by the young participants. Levodopa administration yielded lengthened time production of both target intervals. The aging and levodopa effects did not interact. Also, aging slowed RT and increased RT variability, but levodopa had no effect on the RT. These results suggest that at this dosage and under these specific conditions, timing is dopamine-mediated but the effect of aging on time production is not. Moreover, the levodopa timing effect cannot be attributed to the effects of dopaminergic function on psychomotor speed.
Memory of Ordinal Number Categories in Macaque Monkeys
Authors: Orlov Tanya , Amit Daniel J. , Yakovlev Volodya , Zohary Ehud , Hochstein Shaul
Published: May 2006

What mechanism underlies serial order memory? Studying preverbal serial memory shows that macaque monkeys reproducing a sequence of items can acquire knowledge of item ordinal position. In our previous experiment, macaques were repeatedly presented with image lists (first shown sequentially and then simultaneously on a touch screen together with a distractor chosen randomly from other lists). The task was to touch list images in the correct order. The monkeys' natural tendency was to categorize images by their ordinal position or number because their most common error was touching the distractor when it had the same ordinal number (in its own list) as the correct image. Item-to-item associations were used to complete the categorization strategy. Proposing a dynamic image-salience hypothesis for serial recall (based on category-to-image influence and a salience computation for identifying touch targets), we now study the category label characteristics in the context of this hypothesis.

We found that these category labels are absolute, ordinal-number-based categories (first, second, etc.), not relative memorized as relative distance from the beginning and the end of the list, and not based on fixed ranking of reward contingency/image familiarity. Even isolated from item–item associations, the categories demonstrate category tuning (as well as the corresponding overlap of adjacent ordinal number codes). Moreover, monkeys choose images by proximity of their category to the current touch number, irrespective of the accuracy of the preceding choice. Category tuning itself is symmetric relative to correct ordinal position, but is skewed by other factors (reward, etc.). Tuning width increases with list length, with a concurrent increased use of item-to-item associations for determining touch order.
White Matter Changes Compromise Prefrontal Cortex Function in Healthy Elderly Individuals
Authors: Nordahl Christine Wu , Ranganath Charan , Yonelinas Andrew P. , DeCarli Charles , Fletcher Evan , Jagust William J.
Published: May 2006

Changes in memory function in elderly individuals are often attributed to dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). One mechanism for this dysfunction may be disruption of white matter tracts that connect the PFC with its anatomical targets. Here, we tested the hypothesis that white matter degeneration is associated with reduced prefrontal activation. We used white matter hyperintensities (WMH), a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) finding associated with cerebrovascular disease in elderly individuals, as a marker for white matter degeneration. Specifically, we used structural MRI to quantify the extent of WMH in a group of cognitively normal elderly individuals and tested whether these measures were predictive of the magnitude of prefrontal activity (fMRI) observed during performance of an episodic retrieval task and a verbal working memory task. We also examined the effects of WMH located in the dorsolateral frontal regions with the hypothesis that dorsal PFC WMH would be strongly associated with not only PFC function, but also with areas that are anatomically and functionally linked to the PFC in a task-dependent manner. Results showed that increases in both global and regional dorsal PFC WMH volume were associated with decreases in PFC activity. In addition, dorsal PFC WMH volume was associated with decreased activity in medial temporal and anterior cingulate regions during episodic retrieval and decreased activity in the posterior parietal and anterior cingulate cortex during working memory performance. These results suggest that disruption of white matter tracts, especially within the PFC, may be a mechanism for age-related changes in memory functioning.
Age-related Changes in Object Processing and Contextual Binding Revealed Using fMR Adaptation
Authors: Chee Michael W. L. , Goh Joshua O. S. , Venkatraman Vinod , Tan Jiat Chow , Gutchess Angela , Sutton Brad , Hebrank Andy , Leshikar Eric , Park Denise
Published: May 2006

Using fMR adaptation, we studied the effects of aging on the neural processing of passively viewed naturalistic pictures composed of a prominent object against a background scene. Spatially distinct neural regions showing specific patterns of adaptation to objects, background scenes, and contextual integration (binding) were identified in young adults. Older adults did not show adaptation responses corresponding to binding in the medial-temporal areas. They also showed an adaptation deficit for objects whereby their lateral occipital complex (LOC) did not adapt to repeated objects in the context of a changing background. The LOC could be activated, however, when objects were presented without a background. Moreover, the adaptation deficit for objects viewed against backgrounds was reversed when elderly subjects were asked to attend to objects while viewing these complex pictures. These findings suggest that the elderly have difficulty with simultaneous processing of objects and backgrounds that, in turn, could contribute to deficient contextual binding.
Selective Attention to Specific Features within Objects: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence
Authors: Nobre Anna Christina , Rao Anling , Chelazzi Leonardo
Published: May 2006

Evidence regarding the ability of attention to bias neural processing at the level of single features has been gathering steadily, but most of the experiments to date used arrays with multiple objects and locations, making it difficult to rule out indirect influences from object or spatial attention. To investigate feature-specific selective attention, we have assessed the ability to select and ignore individual features within the same object. We used a negative-priming paradigm in which the color or the direction of internal motion of the object could determine the relevant response. Bidimensional (colored and moving) and unidimensional (colored and stationary, or gray and moving) stimuli appeared in unpredictable order. In successive blocks, participants were instructed that one feature dimension was dominant. During that block, participants responded according to the dominant dimension for bidimensional stimuli. For unidimensional stimuli, participants responded to the only dimension of the stimulus that afforded a response, regardless of the instruction for the block. The ability to inhibit irrelevant task information at the level of specific features (negative priming for features) was indexed by a decrease in performance to detect one particular feature value (e.g., red) if the same feature value (red) but not another color value (green) had been ignored in the previous bidimensional stimulus. Behavioral results confirmed the existence of inhibitory, negative-priming mechanisms at the singlefeature level for both color and motion dimensions of stimuli. Event-related potentials recorded during task performance revealed the dynamics of neural modulation by feature attention. Comparisons were made using the identical physical stimuli under different conditions of attention to isolate purely attentional effects. Processing of identical bidimensional stimuli was compared as a function of the dimension of attention (color, motion). Processing of identical unidimensional stimuli that followed bidimensional stimuli was also compared to identify possible effects of feature-specific negative priming. The electrophysiological effects revealed that inhibition of irrelevant features leads to modulation of brain activity during early stages of perceptual analysis.
Surrounding Suppression and Facilitation in the Determination of Border Ownership
Authors: Sakai Ko , Nishimura Haruka
Published: May 2006

Contextual modulation reported in early- to intermediate-level visual areas could be an essential component to signal border ownership (BO) that specifies the direction of figure along a contour. The surrounding regions that evoke significant suppression or facilitation are highly localized and asymmetric with respect to the center of the classical receptive field (CRF). We propose a hypothesis that such surrounding modulation is a basis for BO-selectivity. Although this idea has been discussed for several years, it is uncertain how many of a vast variety of surrounding organizations could signal correctly the direction of ownership, and how many could signal consistently for various stimuli. We carried out computationally a population study of the surrounding effects to investigate how many cells exhibit effective and consistent BO signals. We tested hundreds of various organizations, and found that most of the asymmetric, iso-orientation suppressive regions, regardless of position or size, lead to surprisingly high consistency in the direction of ownership for various stimuli. The combinations of iso-orientation suppression and cross-orientation facilitation indicate both high robustness and consistency in the ownership determination. We constructed a model for BO-selective neurons based on the surrounding effects, and investigated whether the model reproduces major characteristics of the neuronal responses, including a variety in the BO selectivity among neurons, consistency with respect to various stimuli, invariance to stimulus size, and co-selectivity to BO and contrast. The model reproduced successfully the major characteristics of BO-selective neurons.
Emotional Arousal Can Impair Feature Binding in Working Memory
Authors: Mather Mara , Mitchell Karen J. , Raye Carol L. , Novak Deanna L. , Greene Erich J. , Johnson Marcia K.
Published: May 2006

To investigate whether emotional arousal affects memorial feature binding, we had participants complete a short-term source-monitoring task—remembering the locations of four different pictures over a brief delay. On each trial, the four pictures were all either high arousal, medium arousal, or low arousal. Memory for picture-location conjunctions decreased as arousal increased. In addition, source memory for the location of negative pictures was worse among participants with higher depression scores. Two subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments showed that relative to low-arousal trials, high- and medium-arousal trials resulted in greater activity in areas associated with visual processing (fusiform gyrus, middle temporal gyrus/middle occipital gyrus, lingual gyrus) and less activity in superior precentral gyrus and the precentral-superior temporal intersect. These findings suggest that arousal (and perhaps negative valence for depressed people) recruits attention to items thereby disrupting working memory processes that help bind features together.
Neuroplasticity as a Double-edged Sword: Deaf Enhancements and Dyslexic Deficits in Motion Processing
Authors: Stevens Courtney , Neville Helen
Published: May 2006

We examined the hypothesis that aspects of processing that are most modifiable by experience (i.e., “plastic”) display the most vulnerability in developmental disorders and the most compensatory enhancement after sensory deprivation. A large literature reports that motion processing and magnocellular visual function is selectively deficient in dyslexia. A smaller literature reports enhancements in such functions in deaf individuals. However, studies with dyslexic and deaf individuals have used different experimental paradigms to assess visual function, and no research has yet examined both sides of modifiability (i.e., enhancements and deficits) using the same experimental paradigm. In the present research, visual function was compared in dyslexic (n = 15), deaf (n = 17), and control adults by using automated peripheral kinetic and foveal static perimetry. In the kinetic perimetry task, the dyslexic group showed deficits ( p < .003), whereas the deaf group showed enhancements ( p < .001) for detecting moving light points in the periphery. In the foveal static perimetry task, neither the dyslexic ( p = .866) nor the deaf ( p = .632) group differed significantly from controls in foveal contrast sensitivity thresholds, and no group or individual approached ceiling performance on this task. Taken together, the present data bridge previous literatures and suggest that motion processing tasks are selectively modifiable, either to decrement or enhancement, whereas foveal contrast sensitivity does not differ in dyslexic or deaf groups.
Image Structure at the Center of Gaze during Free Viewing
Authors: Dragoi Valentin , Sur Mriganka
Published: May 2006

It is generally believed that the visual system is adapted to the statistics of the visual world. Measuring and understanding these statistics require precise knowledge of the structure of the signals reaching fovea during image scanning. However, despite the fact that eye movements cause retinal stimulation to change several times in a second, it is implicitly assumed that images are sampled uniformly during natural viewing. By analyzing the eye movements of three rhesus monkeys freely viewing natural scenes, we report here significant anisotropy in stimulus statistics at the center of gaze. We find that fixation on an image patch is more likely to be followed by a saccade to a nearby patch of similar orientation structure or by a saccade to a more distant patch of largely dissimilar orientation structure. Furthermore, we show that orientation-selective neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) can take advantage of eye movement statistics to selectively improve their discrimination performance.
Combined Blockade of Cholinergic Receptors Shifts the Brain from Stimulus Encoding to Memory Consolidation
Authors: Rasch Björn H. , Born Jan , Gais Steffen
Published: May 2006

High central nervous system levels of acetylcholine (ACh) are commonly regarded as crucial for learning and memory, and a decline in cholinergic neurotransmission is associated with Alzheimer's dementia. However, recent findings revealed exceptions to this rule: The low ACh tone characterizing slowwave sleep (SWS) has proven necessary for consolidation of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories during this sleep stage. Such observations, together with recent models of a hippocampal-neocortical dialogue underlying systems memory consolidation, suggest that high levels of ACh support memory encoding, whereas low levels facilitate consolidation. We tested this hypothesis in human subjects by blocking cholinergic neurotransmission during wakefulness, starting 30 min after learning. Subjects received the muscarinic antagonist scopolamine (4 µg/kg bodyweight intravenously) and the nicotinic antagonist mecamylamine (5 mg orally). Compared to placebo, combined muscarinic and nicotinic receptor blockade significantly improved consolidation of declarative memories tested 10 hr later, but simultaneously impaired acquisition of similar material. Consolidation of procedural memories, which are not dependent on hippocampal functioning, was unaffected. Neither scopolamine nor mecamylamine alone enhanced declarative memory consolidation. Our findings support the notion that ACh acts as a switch between modes of acquisition and consolidation. We propose that the natural shift in central nervous system cholinergic tone from high levels during wakefulness to minimal levels during SWS optimizes declarative memory consolidation during a period with no need for new memory encoding.
[Q:] When Would You Prefer a SOSSAGE to a SAUSAGE? [A:] At about 100 msec. ERP Correlates of Orthographic Typicality and Lexicality in Written Word Recognition
Authors: Hauk O. , Patterson K , Woollams A. , Watling L. , Pulvermüller F. , Rogers T. T.
Published: May 2006

Using a speeded lexical decision task, event-related potentials (ERPs), and minimum norm current source estimates, we investigated early spatiotemporal aspects of cortical activation elicited by words and pseudowords that varied in their orthographic typicality, that is, in the frequency of their component letter pairs (bigrams) and triplets (trigrams). At around 100 msec after stimulus onset, the ERP pattern revealed a significant typicality effect, where words and pseudowords with atypical orthography (e.g., yacht, cacht) elicited stronger brain activation than items characterized by typical spelling patterns (cart, yart). At ~200 msec, the ERP pattern revealed a significant lexicality effect, with pseudowords eliciting stronger brain activity than words. The two main factors interacted significantly at around 160 msec, where words showed a typicality effect but pseudowords did not. The principal cortical sources of the effects of both typicality and lexicality were localized in the inferior temporal cortex. Around 160 msec, atypical words elicited the stronger source currents in the left anterior inferior temporal cortex, whereas the left perisylvian cortex was the site of greater activation to typical words. Our data support distinct but interactive processing stages in word recognition, with surface features of the stimulus being processed before the word as a meaningful lexical entry. The interaction of typicality and lexicality can be explained by integration of information from the early form-based system and lexicosemantic processes.
Recovering Space in Unilateral Neglect: A Neurological Dissociation Revealed by Virtual Reality
Authors: Glover Scott , Castiello Umberto
Published: May 2006

Neglect patients often show deficits in responding to targets in the contralesional side of space. Past studies were able to ameliorate these deficits through manipulation of visual input. Here, the neural bases of the recovery of space following virtual reality (VR) training in neglect patients were investigated. Neglect patients were trained to respond to targets in the left side of space that appeared in the central or in the right side of space in a VR system. It was found that only patients with lesions that spared the inferior parietal/superior temporal regions were able to benefit from the VR training. It was concluded that these regions play a crucial role in the recovery of space that underlies the improvement of neglect patients when trained with VR. The implications of these results for determining the neural bases of a higher order attentional and/or spatial representation and for treating patients with unilateral neglect are discussed.
Twin Peaks: An ERP Study of Action Planning and Control in Coacting Individuals
Authors: Sebanz Natalie , Knoblich Günther , Prinz Wolfgang , Wascher Edmund
Published: May 2006

Previous studies have shown that perceiving another's actions activates corresponding representations in an observer's action system. The present study investigated how performing a task with another person affects action planning and control. Reaction times (RTs) and event-related potentials were measured while participants performed a go/no-go task alone and with another person. Three effects of acting together were observed. First, RTs were slowed when individuals had to respond to a stimulus referring to the other's action, suggesting that an action selection conflict occurred. Second, at frontal sites, a stimulus referring to the other's action elicited a similar electrophysiological response as a stimulus referring to one's own action. Finally, on no-go trials, P300 amplitude was significantly larger in a group setting, indicating that an action was suppressed. These findings provide evidence that individuals acting in a social context form shared action representations.
A System of Digital-Botanic Architecture
Authors: Dollens Dennis L.
Published: May 2006

Looking to historical precedents in Louis Sullivan's System of Architectural Ornament (1924) and to botanic inspiration derived from the TumbleTruss Project, the author aims to explain how visual biomimetics and digital production can present ways to conceive, visualize, generate, draw and model physical forms from natural elements such as shells, seeds, plants, rocks, etc. In particular, the author explains how designs “grown” in plant-generating software can be deployed in other software and built as stereolithography (STL) models to illustrate a new system of architectural and sculptural design and production.
Atmospherics/Weather Works: A Spatialized Meteorological Data Sonification Project
Authors: Polli Andrea
Published: May 2006

Atmospherics/Weather Works is a performance, installation and distributed software project for the sonification of storms and other meteorological events, generated directly from data produced by a highly detailed and physically accurate simulation of the weather.
Graphic Primitives and the Embedded Figure in 20th-Century Art: Insights from Neuroscience, Ethology and Perception
Authors: Hodgson Derek
Published: May 2006

Recent investigations into both cognitive science and the functional derivation of the visual brain as well as evolutionary dynamics have led to new and exciting ways of interpreting art. Abstract art has often been regarded as beyond the purview of such interpretations because of the very fact that it is abstract. However, as a visually guided activity, abstraction is eminently suited to an analysis from this perspective. This essay will demonstrate how such an approach can reap rich rewards in the understanding of why and how art came to progress from an earlier representational phase to one of abstraction by examining some of the 20th century's most influential trends.
Musical Color-Painting: In Memory of Yu. A. Pravdyuk
Authors: Zorin Sergei
Published: May 2006

On 17 May 2002 the master of the art form known as musical color-painting, Yury Pravdyuk, passed away in Kharkov, Ukraine. Pravdyuk was the inventor of an ingeniously simple instrument for color-painters and the author of approximately 150 inimitable color-dynamic compositions to accompany the music of composers of different eras and peoples. How the idea of musical color-painting was born and Pravdyuk's creative path is the subject of the present article by one who had been a close assistant of Pravdyuk since 1965.
Revelations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Authors: Goods Daniel E.
Published: May 2006

The author's 2 years of developing installations for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have led him to an appreciation of how similar his thinking and work process are to those of the laboratory's engineers and scientists. For both, certain ideas and processes at first appear crazy and impracticable, but vision and persistence bring them to realization. The three installations described in this article pertain to a future mission that, if successful, will locate a planet similar to Earth and once again change humanity's understanding of its position in the universe.
Degrees of Freedom: Models of Corporate Relationships
Authors: Diamond Sara
Published: May 2006

The author discusses three models of corporate partnership that support the creation of new-media art: directed altruism, skunk works (product development), and regulated self-interest. Similar activities can occur across these models, but expectations, criteria for assessment and final outcomes may differ. Clarifying the rules of engagement for arts organizations and artists when they work with corporations is critical to success for both artists and companies. This essay provides a framework and examples for each model from Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It evaluates failures as well as successes.
Framing the Land and Sky: Art Meets Cosmology in a Sustainable Environment
Authors: Bertol Daniela
Published: May 2006

People have studied the sky from time immemorial: the recurrence of celestial events has been demarcated by signs in the landscape, from simple megaliths to elaborate monuments at architectural scale. The author introduces her project Sunset Farm, establishes links with historical precedents and explores the potential of an art expression where the celebration of cosmological events coincides with sustainable design and production of alternative energy. Furthermore, this art form could promote different layers of awareness in the viewer's perception of land and sky.
Bridging the Arts and Sciences: A Framework for the Psychology of Aesthetics
Authors: Jacobsen Thomas
Published: May 2006

The investigation of aesthetic processing has constituted a longstanding tradition in experimental psychology, of which experimental aesthetics is the second-oldest branch. The status of this psychology of aesthetics, the science of aesthetic processing, is briefly reviewed here. Building on this heritage and drawing on a host of related scientific disciplines, a framework for a strongly interdisciplinary psychology of aesthetics is proposed. It is argued that the topic can be fruitfully approached from at least seven different perspectives, each with multiple levels of analysis: diachronia, ipsichronia, mind, body, content, person and situation. Eventually, this work may coalesce into a unified theory of aesthetic processing.
New Media in Seoul After Midnight
Authors: Phillips Jon
Published: May 2006

A dispatch on the arts, technologies and cultures in the metropolitan community served by the Seoul airport.
Artwork Using 3D Computed Tomography: Extending Radiology into the Realm of Visual Art
Authors: Fung Kai-hung
Published: May 2006

Using scientific data acquired from state-of-the-art multidetector computed tomography (CT) scanners, the author employs 3D CT as a creative medium to demonstrate the beauty of human anatomy. Utilizing this new technology, the author hopes to achieve a new meeting of art and science, extending radiology into the realm of visual art.
Toward a New Kind of Image: Photosynthegraphy
Authors: Guesdon Céline
Published: May 2006

The author presents a new way of creating images that taps into new interrogations of images. The link between art and technology lies at the heart of her research. She uses a prototype camera that makes it possible to generate a 3D mesh starting from a single photograph. She presents various photographic creations begun during earlier studies in order to explain how her work leads to the perception of photography as volume-images.
ZENetic Computer: Exploring Japanese Culture
Authors: Tosa Naoko , Matsuoka Seigow
Published: May 2006

The authors present ZENetic Computer as a means of cultural translation using scientific methods to represent essential aspects of Japanese culture. Using images—deriving from Buddhism and other Asian concepts, sansui (landscape) paintings, poetry and kimonos— that have not heretofore been the focus of computing, the authors project the style of communication developed by Zen schools over hundreds of years into an exotic computing world that users can explore. Through encounters with Zen koans and haiku, the user is constantly and sharply forced to confirm his or her selfawareness for purposes of the story. There is no one right answer to be found anywhere.
Perspectives on Collaborative Research and Education in Media Arts
Authors: Legrady George
Published: May 2006

Digital arts is by nature a hybrid practice, integrating the poetics, aesthetics and conceptual strategies of art with the logical, systematic methods of technological processes from engineering and the sciences. This article reviews the development of interdisciplinary, collaborative arts-engineering research and education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, focusing on the Media Arts & Technology graduate program from a visual/spatial arts perspective.
The Artist and the Scientific Research Environment
Authors: Sandin Daniel J. , DeFanti Tom , Kauffman Lou , Spielmann Yvonne
Published: May 2006

The authors reflect on the experiences of collaboration between artists and scientists at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They outline the measures that enable both media artists and computer scientists to benefit from the collaborations. In particular, if long-term collaborations are to be successful, the collaborators must garner rewards not only in the field of the collaboration but also in their own respective academic or professional fields.
One, Empty Nouns, and θ-Assignment
Authors: Panagiotidis Phoevos
Published: May 2006

The standard analysis that the “pronominal count noun” one is an N′- or NP-level element is challenged and it is argued to be an N0. Moreover, the behavior of one is identified with that of a phonologically empty counterpart. The fact that these N heads lack descriptive content is shown to be the source of two of their distinctive properties: their inability to take arguments, which accounts for their superficially phrasal status, and their triggering of pronominal reference. The existence of a [pronominal] feature is argued against; instead, such noun heads' lack of descriptive content is claimed to be what LF interprets as “pronominal.”
How Antisymmetric Is Syntax?
Authors: Takano Yuji
Published: May 2006

Since the emergence of Kayne's (1994) stimulating proposal for an antisymmetric theory of phrase structure and linear order, much work has been devoted to arguing for or against his theory as well as discussing its empirical predictions. As a result, for a number of phenomena involving rightward positioning, such as rightward adjuncts, heavy NP shift, extraposition, postverbal subjects, and postverbal constituents in OV languages, there now exist both an approach consistent with Kayne's theory (the antisymmetric approach) and another not consistent with it (the symmetric approach). In such a situation, it is often difficult to show on empirical grounds that one approach is superior to the other (see Rochemont and Culicover 1997). In what follows, I describe this situation with respect to two well-known phenomena in English: rightward positioning of adjuncts and heavy NP shift. For each of these phenomena, the symmetric and antisymmetric approaches have been proposed, and both approaches can correctly account for the data discussed in previous studies. Here, I examine the approaches from a novel point of view, showing that data involving the licensing of negative polarity items allow us to differentiate them and to decide which is the right one for each of the two empirical domains. Interestingly, the relevant facts lead to different conclusions for the two phenomena. The results have important implications for the antisymmetric view of syntax.
Consonant Identity and Consonant Copy: The Segmental and Prosodic Structure of Hebrew Reduplication
Authors: Bat-El Outi
Published: May 2006

The article addresses two issues regarding Hebrew reduplication: (a) the distinction between reduplicated and nonreduplicated stems with identical consonants (e.g., minen ‘to apportion’ vs. mimen ‘to finance’), and (b) the patterns of reduplication (C1VC2VC2C, C1VC2C3VC3C,C1VC2C1CVC2C, and C1C2VC3C2CVC3C). These issues are studied from a surface point of view, accounting for speakers’ capacity to parse forms with identical consonants regardless of their base. It is argued that the grammar constructed by the learner on the basis of structural relations (base – output) can also serve for parsing surface forms without reference to a base.
The Structure of Bounded Events
Authors: Thompson Ellen
Published: May 2006

To explain the semantic and syntactic compositionality of bounded interpretations, I propose here that events with a definite end point involve interpretation of the verb and either a bounded direct object or a bounded PP in the checking domain of Asp(ect)P, whereas unbounded events involve interpretation in a projection lower in the clause. This analysis explains the syntactic behavior of the ambiguous adverb quickly. In addition, it follows from the analysis that durative adjuncts are adjoined to VP, while time frame adjuncts are adjoined to AspP. Constructions involving preposition stranding, scope of only, parasitic gaps, and semantic restrictions on adjunct PP objects support this approach.
The Nominative Puzzle and the Low Nominative Hypothesis
Authors: Sigurðsson Halldór Ármann
Published: May 2006

Under the view of nominative Case taken by Chomsky (2000, 2001), one would expect nominative to be the marked or complex Case, being merged after accusative. In fact, however, it is the other way around, nominative preconditioning accusative and also being the Case of simple structures (unaccusative, etc.). The article argues that this Nominative Puzzle is not real, the nominative argument in fact being the first argument merged, raised across the accusative later in the derivation for independent reasons. This approach not only accounts for the dependency correlation between accusative and nominative (Burzio's Generalization), but also offers a derivational account of Condition A correlations (anaphors being merged higher than their “antecedents”). Importantly, it also makes it possible to explain Icelandic quirky constructions in terms of a general matching theory. In addition, the article develops a novel approach to Move as applying for the purpose of successful feature matching.