Anna Grabowska

• Professor
• Professor at SWPS University

What is the relationship between literacy skills and implicit learning? To address previous mixed findings, we compared school‐aged readers, typical (CON, n = 54) and with dyslexia (DYS, n = 53), in relation to their performance on a serial reaction time task. For the first time, we also included an isolated spelling deficit group (ISD, n = 30) to...

Current models of episodic memory posit that retrieval involves the reenactment of encoding processes. Recent evidence has shown that this reinstatement process – indexed by subsequent encoding-retrieval similarity of brain activity patterns - is related to the activity in the hippocampus during encoding. However, we tend to re-experience emotional...

This study focuses on the role of numerous cognitive skills such as phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual and selective attention, auditory skills, and implicit learning in developmental dyslexia. We examined the (co)existence of cognitive deficits in dyslexia and assessed cognitive skills’ predictive value for reading...

There is an ongoing debate concerning the extent to which deficits in reading and spelling share cognitive components and whether they rely, in a similar fashion, on sublexical and lexical pathways of word processing. The present study investigates whether the neural substrates of word processing differ in children with various patterns of reading...

Learning to read changes the brain language system. Phonological processing is the language domain most crucial for reading, but it is still unknown how reading acquisition modifies the neural phonological network in children who either develop dyslexia or are at risk of dyslexia. For the two first years of formal education, we followed 90 beginnin...

Many associative memory traces are charged with emotion that can either impair or enhance subsequent retrieval. Various factors may influence such emotion effects, including the nature of associations and type of emotions. We show that long-term recognition memory of very close verbal associations was enhanced for emotionally charged material, and...

The manuscript reports a study on a large sample (N = 170) of Polish speaking 8–13 year old children, whose brain activation was measured in relation to tasks that require auditory phonological processing. We aimed to relate brain activation to individual differences in reading and spelling. We found that individual proficiency in both reading and...

Although empathy for pain is an often studied phenomenon, only few studies employing electromyography (EMG) have investigated either emotional responses to the pain of others or factors that modulate these responses. The present study investigated whether the sex and attractiveness of persons experiencing pain affected muscle activity associated wi...

The prevalence and long-term consequences of dyslexia make it crucial to look for efective and efcient ways of its therapy. Action video games (AVG) were implied as a possible remedy for difculties in reading in Italian and English-speaking children. However, the studies examining the efectiveness of AVG application in dyslexia sufered from signifc...

The tendency to lie is a part of personality. But are personality traits the only factors that make some people lie more often than others? We propose that cognitive abilities have equal importance. People with higher cognitive abilities are better, and thus more effective liars. This might reinforce using lies to solve problems. Yet, there is no e...

The evolution of posterior distributions after each experiment. Posteriors from previous experiments were used as priors in the following experiments. (PDF)

Task instructions. The original instructions were presented in Polish. (PDF)

The parameters of a full and reduced model. The full model includes all measured variables, but due to missing values includes fewer samples (reported in the main body of the manuscript). The reduced model excludes the variables with many missing values, but includes more samples. (PDF)

The counts of each response type for each experiment. The whiskers indicate minimum/maximum, the bottom/up of each box indicates 1st and 3rd quartile, respectively and the horizontal line inside the box indicates the median. (PDF)

A substantial number of studies provide evidence documenting a variety of sex differences in the brain. It remains unclear whether sexual differentiation at the neural level is related to that observed in daily behavior, cognitive function, and the risk of developing certain psychiatric and neurological disorders. Some investigators have questioned...

The tendency to lie is a part of personality. But are personality traits the only factors that make some people lie more often than others? We propose that cognitive abilities have equal importance. People with higher cognitive abilities are better, and thus more effective liars. This might reinforce using lies to solve problems. Yet, there is no e...

Erratum to: Behav Res 10.3758/s13428-015-0620-1 The corresponding authors would like to point out that they have separate e-mail addresses: m.riegel@nencki.gov.pl (M. Riegel) and a.marchewka@nencki.gov.pl (A. Marchewka). Additionally, the corresponding authors would like to indicate that the NAPS BE system is freely accessible to the scientific...

Convincing participants to deceive remains one of the biggest and most important challenges of laboratory-based deception research. The simplest and most prevalent method involves explicitly instructing participants to lie or tell the truth before presenting each task item. The usual finding of such experiments is increased cognitive load associate...

Emotion influences various cognitive processes, such as memory. This beneficial or detrimental effect can be studied with verbal material, yet in this case a broad term of context needs to be taken into account. The present work reviews recent literature and proposes that traditional differentiation between semantic and environmental context should...

The Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS; Marchewka, Żurawski, Jednoróg, & Grabowska, Behavior Research Methods, 2014) is a standardized set of 1,356 realistic, high-quality photographs divided into five categories (people, faces, animals, objects, and landscapes). NAPS has been primarily standardized along the affective dimensions of valence, aro...

The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotion...

The neural basis of specific reading disability (SRD) remains only partly understood. A dozen studies have used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate gray matter volume (GMV) differences between SRD and control children, however, recent meta-analyses suggest that few regions are consistent across studies. We used data collected across three...

In the present article, we introduce the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL), created in order to provide researchers with a database of 2,902 Polish words, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and imageability. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic features of the words (frequency, grammatical...

Several functional neuroimaging studies in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have suggested that changes in the frontoparietal-striatal networks are associated with deficits in executive functioning. However, executive functions (EF) are multifaceted and include three dissociable components: working memory, response inhibition, and task-switch...

The variety of different causal theories together with inconsistencies about the anatomical brain markers emphasize the heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia. Attempts were made to test on a behavioral level the existence of subtypes of dyslexia showing distinguishable cognitive deficits. Importantly, no research was directly devoted to the inves...

Selecting appropriate stimuli to induce emotional states is essential in affective research. Only a few standardized affective stimulus databases have been created for auditory, language, and visual materials. Numerous studies have extensively employed these databases using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. However, some limitations of the...

Multi-centre data repositories like the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) offer a unique research platform, but pose questions concerning comparability of results when using a range of imaging protocols and data processing algorithms. The variability is mainly due to the non-quantitative character of the widely used structural T1-w...

The present study investigates the neurobiological basis of two subtypes of dyslexia with either a double deficit (concerning phonological awareness and rapid naming) or a single rapid naming deficit. We compared such groups of German dyslexic primary school children to each other and with good reading children in a phoneme deletion task performed...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in the brain organization of motor control in left- and right-handers and to study whether early left-to-right handwriting switch changes the cortical representation of finger movements in the left and right hemispheres. Echo-planar MR imaging was performed in 52 subjects: consistent righ...

Deception has always been a part of human communication as it helps to promote self-presentation. Although both men and women are equally prone to try to manage their appearance, their strategies, motivation and eagerness may be different. Here, we asked if lying could be influenced by gender on both the behavioral and neural levels. To test whethe...

In adults, the onset of coherent motion compared to random motion in a random dot kinematogram leads to a right hemispheric amplitude advantage of the N2 response. The source of this asymmetry is believed to lie in the motion selective MT+ cortex. Here, we tested whether the right tempo-parietal N2 component shows a similar regularity in children....

The Stop-Signal Task (SST) is a procedure that can provide a measure of inhibitory control of an ongoing motor response. We used the stop-signal paradigm to determine whether deficient inhibitory control distinguishes children with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder combined type (ADHD-Com) from normally developing children, ma...

The aim of the study was to investigate differences in electrophysiological brain activity between children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder combined type (ADHD-Com) and normally developing children, using the auditory 2-tone oddball paradigm. Forty right-handed subjects aged between 6.9 and 12.3 years participated in the pre...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most frequent cause of dementia. For this reason, a simple, reliable, and inexpensive method of early AD detection is urgently required. The location of neuropathological changes in AD patients indicates the potential diagnostic utility of olfactory tests. The purpose of this study was to compare odor identification...

Empathy allows us to internally simulate the affective and cognitive mental states of others. Neurobiological studies suggest that empathy is a complex phenomenon, which can be described using a model that includes 2 modes of processing: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up neural processing is achieved via the mirroring representation systems that pl...

The EMG activity associated with static and dynamic facial expressions (morphs with happy or angry emotions) were compared. We hypothesized that dynamic faces would (a) enhance facial muscular reactions and (b) evoke higher intensity ratings. Our analysis showed that dynamic expressions were rated as more intense than static ones. Subjects reacted...

We investigated whether phonological deficits are a consequence of magnocellular processing deficits in dyslexic and control children. In Experiment 1, children were tested for reading ability, phonological awareness, visuo-magnocellular motion perception, and attention shifting (sometimes considered as magnocellular function). A two-step cluster a...

The issue concerning the neuronal basis of true and false recognition is still a subject of extensive debate. In the present study voxel based morphometry (VBM) was used to examine structural brain correlates of these processes. Since several studies indicate that emotional content facilitates false recognition we decided to use emotional stimuli....

Empathy is an ability to share and understand emotional state of other person. In this article, based on research results of cognitive and social neuroscience as well as neuropsychology, we show that empathy is a complex process engaging both bottom-up and top-down neural processing. Functioning of the former one is probably based on mirror neurons...

Different theories conceptualise dyslexia as either a phonological, attentional, auditory, magnocellular, or automatisation deficit. Such heterogeneity suggests the existence of yet unrecognised subtypes of dyslexics suffering from distinguishable deficits. The purpose of the study was to identify cognitive subtypes of dyslexia. Out of 642 children...

Tactile sensitivity enhancement (TSE) observed in blind people is probably a result of intensified tactile training. Although many researchers consider TSE in the blind to be an example of use-dependent plasticity, it is unclear whether the effects of training (Braille reading) are specific, i.e. restricted to the trained function and hand, or if t...

Background. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most frequent cause of dementia. For this reason scientists are searching for a simple, reliable and cheap method of early detection of AD. The location of neuropathological changes in AD patients indicates the potential diagnostic utility of olfactory tests. The aim of this study was to determine and com...

Inhibition underlies cognitive processes such as overcoming habitual responses, suppressing of goal-irrelevant information, and switching of attention between stimuli or task rules. These processes are thought to depend on the frontal lobes. However, the precise role of the ventral frontal regions (orbitofrontal cortex) in these processes remains e...

Affective (emotional) prosody is a neuropsychological function that encompasses non-verbal aspects of language that are necessary for recognizing and conveying emotions in communication, whereas non-affective (linguistic) prosody indicates whether the sentence is a question, an order or a statement. Considerable evidence points to a dominant role f...

Recent development of neuroimaging techniques has opened new possibilities for the study of the relation between handedness and the brain functional architecture. Here we report fMRI measurements of dominant and non-dominant hand movement representation in 12 right-handed subjects using block design. We measured possible asymmetry in the total volu...

Most research on the perception of emotional expressions is conducted using static faces as stimuli. However, facial displays of emotion are a highly dynamic phenomenon and a static photograph is its very unnatural representation. The goal of the present research was to assess the role of stimuli dynamics as well as subjects' sex in the perception...

Eye movements latencies toward peripherally presented stimuli were measured in 10-year-old dyslexic and control children. Dyslexic subjects, previously found to be oversensitive to stimulation of the magnocellular channel, showed reduced latencies as compared to normally reading controls. An attention shifting task was also used which showed no gro...

Dyslexic and control children were tested in a visuomotor attentional task, which provides independent measures of the alerting, orienting and conflict components of the attentional system. Our results show that dyslexics are impaired with respect to controls in the attentional conflict component (resolution of conflict of incongruent peripheral in...

There is a growing body of evidence that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is implicated in the new learning of visual items. Little is known, however, as to the involvement of that portion of the prefrontal cortex in the learning of temporal and spatial relationship of those items. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to investiga...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of small unilateral lesions to the ventromedial portion of the prefrontal cortex on two memory functions: memory for objects and memory for object locations. Patients, who had undergone surgery of the anterior communicating artery aneurysm, and normal control subjects, participated in the s...

The so-called female sex hormone, estrogen, is best known for its crucial involvement in reproductive cycle. Recent research revealed that estrogen also plays a significant neuromodulatory and neuroprotective role. Evidence from clinical and experimental studies show that estrogen modulates specific cognitive functions such as memory and learning....

The hypothesis of a magnocellular channel deficit in dyslexia was tested. Subjects were 10-year-old dyslexics and normal readers. Psychophysical thresholds for luminance and chromatic contrasts were estimated using black and white and red and green sinusoidal gratings of various spatial frequencies, presented in static and dynamic conditions (drift...

This study examined the relationship between sex role and gender identity in a Polish transsexual population where, unlike in Western countries, male-to-female (MF) transsexualism is much less common than female-to-male (FM) transsexualism. One hundred and three FM (82 primary, 21 secondary) and 29 MF (16 primary, 13 secondary) transsexuals plus 13...

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of unilateral brain lesions on the perception of subjective contours. Brain damage resulted in a reduced ability to perceive the illusion. The effect, however, was hemisphere and sex dependent. In women an illusion decrement due to either the left or right hemisphere damage was observed, while in m...

The purpose of this study was to clarify the role of the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex in short-term visual memory. Patients with focal lesions to the right gyrus rectus were impaired on a size judgement task, which required short-term retention of laterally presented visual patterns. The impairment was most evident when the stimuli were addresse...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of unilateral brain lesions on Mueller-Lyer (M-L) illusion in the two sexes. Patients with left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) damage and control subjects participated in the experiment. They inspected series of M-L patterns in which the shaft with out-going fins was gradually shortened...

In this article, the authors present a review of research on the role of the 2 hemispheres in processing spatial frequencies. J. Sergent (1982a) postulated that the hemispheres differ in their sensitivity to frequency characteristics of the sensory outputs on which cognitive processes are performed. Specifically, she proposed that the right hemisph...

In this article, the authors present a review of research on the role of the 2 hemispheres in processing spatial frequencies. J. Sergent (1982a) postulated that the hemispheres differ in their sensitivity to frequency characteristics of the sensory outputs on which cognitive processes are performed. Specifically, she proposed that the right hemisph...

12 males and 8 females made odd vs even classification judgments on numbers presented visually in 3 different formats: digits, number words, and dot patterns. Males showed longer decision times for odd numbers only when the numbers were presented in the dot pattern format. Females showed this effect only when the stimuli were presented in the word...

Dynamic facial expressions of emotion are ecologically valid and powerful media for emotional communication compared to static expressions. However, little is known about perceiving and processing dynamic facial expressions of emotions. In the presented study we compared the EMG activity to dynamic (natural) facial expressions with the static ones...