Claudia Poch

Complutense University of Madrid | UCM · Department of Basic Psychology I (Basic Processes)

Ongoing brain activity preceding visual stimulation has been suggested to shape conscious perception. The underlying mechanisms are still under adebate,lthough alpha oscillations have been pointed out as the main explanatory candidate. According to the pulsed-inhibition framework, bouts of functional inhibition arise in each alpha cycle, allowing i...

Introduction Pattern separation (PS) is a fundamental aspect of memory creation that defines the ability to transform similar memory representations into distinct ones, so they do not overlap when storing and retrieving them. Experimental evidence in animal models and the study of other human pathologies have demonstrated the role of the hippocampu...

This ERP study used a grammaticality judgement task to analyse the interface between morphosyntactic and affective processing, as well as the modulatory role of individual differences. Participants (mostly women) were presented with Spanish noun phrases (Determiner + Noun + Adjective) in which the noun and the adjective (pleasant or neutral) either...

There is broad consensus supporting the reciprocal influence of working memory (WM) and attention. Top-down mechanisms operate to cope with either environmental or internal demands. In that sense, it is possible to select an item within the contents of WM to endow it with prioritized access. Although evidence supports that maintaining an item in th...

Recent evidence indicates that emotion influences the computation of agreement dependencies based on number or gender. In this event-related potential study, we examined the role of emotion in the processing of person information. Participants made grammatical judgements to sentences with positive, negative and neutral verbs that either matched or...

Emotional words differ in how they acquire their emotional charge. There is a relevant distinction between emotion-label words (those that directly name an emotion, e.g., “joy” or “sadness”) and emotion-laden words (those that do not name an emotion, but can provoke it, e.g., “party” or “death”). In this work, we focused on emotion-label words. The...

It has been proposed that alpha oscillations reflect the endogenous modulation of visual cortex excitability. In particular, alpha power increases during the maintenance period in Working Memory (WM) tasks have been interpreted as a mechanism to avoid potential interference of incoming stimuli. In this study we tested whether alpha power was modula...

Two main explanations for memory loss have been proposed. On the one hand, decay theories consider that over time memory fades away. On the other hand, interference theories sustain that when similar memories are encoded, they become more prone to confusion. The interference is greater as the degree of similarity between memories increases, and as...

Evaluative markers of diminution and augmentation typically express quantity or intensity. Prior evidence suggests that they also convey emotions, although it remains unexplored as to whether this function is mediated by their role in expressing quantification/intensification. Here we investigated the effects of evaluative suffixes on the assessmen...

Visuospatial working memory (WM) requires the activity of a spread network, including right parietal regions, to sustain storage capacity, attentional deployment, and active manipulation of information. Notably, while the electrophysiological correlates of such regions have been explored using many different indices, evidence for a functional invol...

Working Memory (WM) is a limited capacity system for storing and processing information, which varies from subject to subject. Several works show the ability to predict the performance of WM with machine learning (ML) methods, and although good prediction results are obtained in these works, ignoring the intersubject variability and the temporal an...

The level of processing hypothesis (LoP) proposes that the transition from unaware to aware visual perception is graded for low-level (i.e., energy, features) stimulus whereas dichotomous for high-level (i.e., letters, words, meaning) stimulus. In this study, we explore the behavioral patterns and neural correlates associated to different depths (i...

Decades of research have increased the understanding of the contribution of the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs) to semantic cognition. Nonetheless, whether semantic processing of different types of information show a selective relationship with left and right ATLs, or whether semantic processing in the ATLs is independent of the modality of the inpu...

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) is a neurological disorder associated with histopathological changes in different subfields of the hippocampus. These alterations have been associated with memory difficulties. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that these difficulties stem on mnemonic discrimination impairment due to a reduced ability to m...

The presentation of simple auditory stimuli can significantly impact visual processing and even induce visual illusions, such as the auditory-induced double flash illusion (DFI). These cross-modal processes have been shown to be driven by occipital oscillatory activity within the alpha band. Whether this phenomenon is network specific or can be gen...

Visual object naming is a complex cognitive process that engages an interconnected network of cortical regions moving from occipitotemporal to anterior–inferior temporal cortices, and extending into the inferior frontal cortex. Naming can fail for diverse reasons, and different stages of the naming multi‐step process appear to be reliant upon the i...

Working memory can be enhanced by directing attention to task-relevant representations. Alpha oscillations are a neural correlate of spatial attention either to the perceptual or the mnemonic domain. Specifically, an enhancement of alpha power is observed in the ipsilateral posterior cortex to the locus of attention, along with a suppression in the...

This study aimed to elucidate whether distinct early processes underlie the perception of our own face. Alternatively, self-face perception might rely on the same processes that realize the perception of highly familiar faces. To this end, we recorded EEG activity while participants performed a facial recognition task in which they had to discrimin...

The accumulation of similar interfering experiences hampers our ability to retrieve information. To reduce interference, pattern separation allows the separation similar memories and build detailed memory representations that are less easily confused. To investigate mnemonic interference, previous research has used a mnemonic discrimination paradig...

Evidence from prior studies has shown an advantage in recognition memory for emotional compared to neutral words. Whether this advantage is short-lived or rather extends over longer periods, as well as whether the effect depends on words' valence (i.e., positive or negative), remains unknown. In the present ERP/EEG study, we investigated this issue...

Selective attention can enhance Working Memory (WM) performance by selecting relevant information, while preventing distracting items from encoding or from further maintenance. Alpha oscillatory modulations are a correlate of visuospatial attention. Specifically, an enhancement of alpha power is observed in the ipsilateral posterior cortex to the l...

Reasoning is a fundamental human ability, vulnerable to error. According to behavioural measures, we are biased to consider valid the conclusion of an argument based on the veracity of the conclusion itself rather than on the formal logic of the argument. Nowadays, brain imaging techniques can be used to explore peoplés responses as they reason wit...

Working Memory (WM) maintains flexible representations. Retrospective cueing studies indicate that selective attention can be directed to memory representations in WM improving performance. While most of the work has explored the neural substrates of orienting attention based on a spatial retro-cue, behavioral studies show that a feature other than...

Numerous electrophysiological findings support the notion that selective attention modulates alpha oscillatory activity. Specifically, alpha enhancement and suppression can be dissociated in time and space. It is now accepted that selective attention operates in either the perceptual or the representational environments. Lateralized alpha activity...

Objective: Small temporal pole encephalocele (STPE) can be the pathologic substrate of epilepsy in a subgroup of patients with noninformative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Herein, we analyzed the clinical, neurophysiologic, and radiologic features of the epilepsy found in 22 patients with STPE, and the frequency of STPE in patients with refrac...

Objective: Naming difficulties are frequently observed in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Although damage/removal of regions of the anterior temporal neocortex including the temporal pole is considered critical for those difficulties, 1 relevant hypothesis proposes that hippocampal damage also has a role. Our aim was to better understa...

Accumulating evidence suggests that visual object understanding involves a rapid feedforward sweep, after which subsequent recurrent interactions are necessary. The extent to which recurrence plays a critical role in object processing remains to be determined. Recent studies have demonstrated that recurrent processing is modulated by increasing sem...

Naming is considered a left hemisphere function that operates according to a posterior-anterior specificity gradient, with more fine-grained information processed in most anterior regions of the temporal lobe (ATL), including the temporal pole (TP). Word finding difficulties are typically assessed using visual confrontation naming tasks, and have b...

Selective attention mechanisms allow us to focus on information that is relevant to the current behavior and, equally important, ignore irrelevant information. An influential model proposes that oscillatory neural activity in the alpha band serves as an active functional inhibitory mechanism. Recent studies have shown that, in the same way that att...

Multi-store models of working memory (WM) have given way to more dynamic approaches that conceive WM as an activated subset of long-term memory (LTM). The resulting framework considers that memory representations are governed by a hierarchy of accessibility. The activated part of LTM holds representations in a heightened state of activation, some o...

An increasing amount of evidence supports a crucial role for the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in semantic processing. Critically, a selective disruption of the functional connectivity between left and right ATLs in patients with chronic aphasic stroke has been illustrated. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the consequences that lesions o...

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) is the most prevalent form of focal epilepsy, and hippocampal sclerosis (HS) is considered the most frequent associated pathological finding. Recent connectivity studies have shown that abnormalities, either structural or functional, are not confined to the affected hippocampus, but can be found in other connect...

Working memory (WM) is the ability to transiently maintain and manipulate internal representations beyond its external availability to the senses. This process is thought to support high level cognitive abilities and been shown to be strongly predictive of individual intelligence and reasoning abilities. While early models of WM have relied on a mo...

There is now growing evidence that the hippocampus generates theta rhythms that can phase bias fast neural oscillations in the neocortex, allowing coordination of widespread fast oscillatory populations outside limbic areas. A recent magnetoencephalographic study showed that maintenance of configural-relational scene information in a delayed match-...

The present study investigated the binding of verbal and spatial features in immediate memory. In a recent study, we demonstrated incidental and asymmetrical letter-location binding effects when participants attended to letter features (but not when they attended to location features) that were associated with greater oscillatory activity over pref...

Polymorphisms of DRD2 and ANKK1 have been associated with psychiatric syndromes where there is believed to be an underlying learning process deficit such as addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and psychopathy. We investigated the effects of the DRD2 C957T and ANKK1 TaqIA single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), which have been associated with ps...

In this study we demonstrated implicit verbal-spatial binding effects that were dependent on the task-relevant feature. We used MEG to measure brain activity underpinning the maintenance of verbal and spatial features in two recognition tasks, based on a letter-location paradigm previously used in binding studies. Both tasks were identical in terms...

Many cognitive abilities involve the integration of information from different modalities, a process referred to as "binding." It remains less clear, however, whether the creation of bound representations occurs in an involuntary manner, and whether the links between the constituent features of an object are symmetrical. We used magnetoencephalogra...