Andrew Persichetti

National Institute of Mental Health | NUDZ · Section on Cognitive Neuropsychology

Neuroimaging studies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) consistently find an aberrant pattern of "reduced" laterality in brain networks that support functions related to social communication and language. However, it is unclear how the underlying functional organization of these brain networks is altered in ASD individuals. We test...

Neuroimaging studies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) consistently find an aberrant pattern of "reduced" laterality in brain networks that support functions related to social communication and language. However, it is unclear how the underlying functional organization of these brain networks is altered in ASD individuals. We test...

Since the discovery of three scene-selective regions in the human brain, a central assumption has been that all three regions directly support navigation. We propose instead that cortical scene processing regions support three distinct computational goals (and one not for navigation at all): (i) The parahippocampal place area supports scene categor...

Even though the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) comprises several anatomical and functional subdivisions, it is often reduced to a homogeneous theoretical entity, such as a domain-general convergence zone, or “hub”, for semantic information. Methodological limitations are largely to blame for the imprecise mapping of function to structure in the ATL....

The human ability to imagine motor actions without executing them (i.e., motor imagery) is crucial to a number of cognitive functions, including motor planning and learning, and has been shown to improve response times and accuracy of subsequent motor actions [1, 2]. Although these behavioral findings suggest the possibility that imagined movements...

Significance Humans are capable of many sophisticated behaviors. One such behavior is using landmarks to navigate from one place to another, distant place. This type of navigation, known as landmark-based navigation, requires the navigator to extract spatial information from places in the environment. Another sophisticated behavior is recognizing t...

When entering an environment, we can use the present visual information from the scene to either recognize the kind of place it is (e.g., a kitchen or a bedroom) or navigate through it. Here we directly test the hypothesis that these two processes, what we call “scene categorization” and “visually-guided navigation”, are supported by dissociable ne...

Diverse animal species primarily rely on sense (left–right) and egocentric distance (proximal–distal) when navigating the environment. Recent neuroimaging studies with human adults show that this information is represented in 2 scene-selective cortical regions—the occipital place area (OPA) and retrosplenial complex (RSC)—but not in a third scene-s...

Recent work has suggested that visual scene processing is composed of two distinct systems: one for navigation, including the occipital place area (OPA) and retrosplenial complex (RSC), and the other for scene categorization (e.g., recognizing a scene as a kitchen), including the parahippocampal place area (PPA). If scene processing is indeed compo...

Neuroimaging studies in human adults have identified three cortical regions involved in scene processing: the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the retrosplenial complex (RSC), and the occipital place area (OPA). While the precise function each of these regions plays in scene processing is unclear, results from several studies suggest that scene pr...

Color names divide the fine-grained gamut of color percepts into discrete categories. A categorical transition must occur somewhere between the initial encoding of the continuous spectrum of light by the cones and the verbal report of the name of a color stimulus. Here, we used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) adaptation experiment to...

A central concern in the study of learning and decision-making is the identification of neural signals associated with the values of choice alternatives. An important factor in understanding the neural correlates of value is the representation of the object itself, separate from the act of choosing. Is it the case that the representation of an obje...

Color names may be used to divide the continuous spectrum of color percepts into discrete categories. We asked whether there is a transition from a continuous towards a categorical representation of color along the visual pathways from V1 to ventral extra-striate cortex. Ten subjects performed a behavioral color categorization task on 10 stimuli th...