Now showing items 1-20 of 78

    • Affect of the unconscious: Visually suppressed angry faces modulate our decisions 

      Almeida, Jorge; Pajtas, Petra E.; Mahon, Bradford Z.; Nakayama, Ken; Caramazza, Alfonso (Springer Nature, 2012)
      Emotional and affective processing imposes itself over cognitive processes and modulates our perception of the surrounding environment. In two experiments, we addressed the issue of whether nonconscious processing of affect ...
    • All Talk and No Action: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Study of Motor Cortex Activation During Action Word Production 

      Oliveri, Massimiliano; Finocchiaro, Chiara; Shapiro, Kevin Alfred; Gangitano, Massimo; Caramazza, Alfonso; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2004)
      A number of researchers have proposed that the premotor and motor areas are critical for the representation of words that refer to actions, but not objects. Recent evidence against this hypothesis indicates that the left ...
    • Analysis and interpretation of serial position data 

      Olson, Andrew; Romani, Cristina; Caramazza, Alfonso (Informa UK Limited, 2010)
      The representation of serial position in sequences is an important topic in a variety of cognitive areas including the domains of language, memory, and motor control. In the neuropsychological literature, serial position ...
    • Asymmetric fMRI Adaptation Reveals No Evidence for Mirror Neurons in Humans 

      Lingnau, Angelika; Gesierich, Benno; Caramazza, Alfonso (National Academy of Sciences, 2009)
      Neurons in macaque ventral premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobe discharge during both the observation and the execution of motor acts. It has been claimed that these so-called mirror neurons form the basis of action ...
    • Attention selection, distractor suppression and N2pc 

      Mazza, Veronica; Turatto, Massimo; Caramazza, Alfonso (Elsevier BV, 2009)
      N2pc is generally interpreted as the electrocortical correlate of the distractor-suppression mechanisms through which attention selection takes place in humans. Here, we present data that challenge this common N2pc ...
    • Brain Regions That Represent Amodal Conceptual Knowledge 

      Fairhall, S. L.; Caramazza, Alfonso (Society for Neuroscience, 2013)
      To what extent do the brain regions implicated in semantic processing contribute to the representation of amodal conceptual content rather than modality-specific mechanisms or mechanisms of semantic access and manipulation? ...
    • Category-selective neural substrates for person- and place-related concepts 

      Fairhall, Scott L.; Caramazza, Alfonso (Elsevier BV, 2013)
      The influence of object-category on the representation of semantic knowledge remains unresolved. We present a functional magnetic resonance imaging study that investigates whether there are distinct neural substrates for ...
    • Category-Specific Organization in the Human Brain Does Not Require Visual Experience 

      Mahon, Bradford Z.; Anzellotti, Stefano; Schwarzbach, Jens; Zampini, Massimiliano; Caramazza, Alfonso (Elsevier BV, 2009)
      Distinct regions within the ventral visual pathway show neural specialization for nonliving and living stimuli (e.g., tools, houses versus animals, faces). The causes of these category preferences are widely debated. Using ...
    • Closely overlapping responses to tools and hands in left lateral occipitotemporal cortex 

      Bracci, S.; Cavina-Pratesi, C.; Ietswaart, M.; Caramazza, Alfonso; Peelen, M. V. (American Physiological Society, 2011)
      The perception of object-directed actions performed by either hands or tools recruits regions in left fronto-parietal cortex. Here, using functional MRI (fMRI), we tested whether the common role of hands and tools in object ...
    • Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms Underlying Visual and Semantic Processing: Implications from “Optic Aphasia” 

      Hillis, Argye E.; Caramazza, Alfonso (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995)
      We report detailed analyses of the performance of a patient, DHY, who as a consequence of strokes in the left occipital lobe and the periventricular white matter in the region of the spleniuni, showed severely impaired ...
    • Concepts and Categories: A Cognitive Neuropsychological Perspective 

      Mahon, Bradford Z.; Caramazza, Alfonso (Annual Reviews, 2009)
      One of the most provocative and exciting issues in cognitive science is how neural specificity for semantic categories of common objects arises in the functional architecture of the brain. More than two decades of research ...
    • Concepts Are More than Percepts: The Case of Action Verbs 

      Bedny, Marina; Caramazza, Alfonso; Grossman, Emily; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro; Saxe, Rebecca (The Society for Neuroscience, 2008)
      Several regions of the posterior-lateral-temporal cortex (PLTC) are reliably recruited when participants read or listen to action verbs, relative to other word and nonword types. This PLTC activation is generally interpreted ...
    • Continuous perception of motion and shape across saccadic eye movements 

      Fracasso, Alessio; Caramazza, Alfonso; Melcher, David (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), 2010)
      Although our naïve experience of visual perception is that it is smooth and coherent, the actual input from the retina involves brief and discrete fixations separated by saccadic eye movements. This raises the question of ...
    • Cortical systems for local and global integration in discourse comprehension 

      Egidi, Giovanna; Caramazza, Alfonso (Elsevier BV, 2013)
      To understand language, we integrate what we hear or read with prior context. This research investigates the neural systems underlying this integration process, in particular the integration of incoming linguistic information ...
    • A Critical Look at the Embodied Cognition Hypothesis and a New Proposal for Grounding Conceptual Content 

      Mahon, Bradford; Caramazza, Alfonso (Elsevier, 2008)
      Many studies have demonstrated that the sensory and motor systems are activated during conceptual processing. Such results have been interpreted as indicating that concepts, and important aspects of cognition more broadly, ...
    • Cross-Modal Plasticity Preserves Functional Specialization in Posterior Parietal Cortex 

      Lingnau, A.; Strnad, Lukas; He, Chenxi; Fabbri, Sara; Han, Zaizhu; Bi, Yanchao; Caramazza, Alfonso (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2012)
      In congenitally blind individuals, many regions of the brain that are typically heavily involved in visual processing are recruited for a variety of nonvisual sensory and cognitive tasks (Rauschecker 1995; Pascual-Leone ...
    • The Cumulative Semantic Cost Does Not Reflect Lexical Selection By Competition 

      Navarrete, Eduardo; Mahon, Bradford Z.; Caramazza, Alfonso (Elsevier, 2010)
      The cumulative semantic cost describes a phenomenon in which picture naming latencies increase monotonically with each additional within-category item that is named in a sequence of pictures. Here we test whether the ...
    • Decoding Representations of Face Identity That are Tolerant to Rotation 

      Anzellotti, Stefano; Fairhall, Scott L.; Caramazza, Alfonso (Oxford University Press (OUP), 2013)
      In order to recognize the identity of a face we need to distinguish very similar images (specificity) while also generalizing identity information across image transformations such as changes in orientation (tolerance). ...
    • Differential Activity for Animals and Manipulable Objects in the Anterior Temporal Lobes 

      Anzellotti, Stefano; Mahon, Bradford Z.; Schwarzbach, Jens; Caramazza, Alfonso (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011)
      Neuropsychological evidence has highlighted the role of the anterior temporal lobes in the processing of conceptual knowledge. That putative role is only beginning to be investigated with fMRI as methodological advances ...
    • Disrupting the Brain to Validate Hypotheses on the Neurobiology of Language 

      Papeo, Liuba; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro; Caramazza, Alfonso (Frontiers Research Foundation, 2013)
      Comprehension of words is an important part of the language faculty, involving the joint activity of frontal and temporo-parietal brain regions. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) enables the controlled perturbation ...