Elizabeth Jefferies

The University of York · Department of Psychology

Recent theories of cortical organisation maintain that important features of brain function emerge through the spatial arrangement of regions of cortex. For example, areas of association cortex are located in regions of cortex furthest from sensory and motor cortex. Association cortex is also ‘interdigitated’ since adjacent regions can have relativ...

BACKGROUND. Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is typically associated with pathology of the hippocampus, a key structure involved in relational memory processes, including episodic, semantic, and spatial memory. While it is widely accepted that TLE-associated hippocampal alterations may underlie global deficits in memory, it remains poorly understood wh...

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), one of the most common pharmaco-resistant epilepsies, is associated with pathology of paralimbic brain regions, particularly in the mesiotemporal lobe. Cognitive dysfunction in TLE is frequent, and particularly affects episodic memory. Crucially, these difficulties challenge the quality of life of patients, sometimes m...

Although memory is known to play a key role in creativity, previous studies have not isolated the critical component processes and networks. We asked participants to generate links between words that ranged from strongly related to completely unrelated in long-term memory, delineating the neurocognitive processes that underpin more unusual versus s...

Previous research has indicated that health and well-being are impacted on by both the way we think, and the things we do. In the laboratory, studies suggest that specific task contexts affect this process because the people we are with, the places we are in, and the activities we perform may influence our thought patterns. In our study participant...

Background: People with language problems following stroke (aphasia) benefit from speech and language therapy. Optimising speech and language therapy for aphasia recovery is a research priority. Objectives: The objectives were to explore patterns and predictors of language and communication recovery, optimum speech and language therapy intervention...

Understanding how thought emerges from the topographical structure of the cerebral cortex is a primary goal of cognitive neuroscience. Recent work has revealed a principal gradient of intrinsic connectivity capturing the separation of sensory-motor cortex from transmodal regions of the default mode network (DMN); this is thought to facilitate memor...

Semantic control is the capability to operate on meaningful representations, selectively focusing on certain aspects of meaning while purposefully ignoring other aspects based on one's behavioral aim. This ability is especially vital for comprehending figurative/am-biguous language. It remains unclear why and how regions involved in semantic contro...

The Inferior Frontal Occipital Fasciculus (IFOF) is a major anterior-to-posterior white matter pathway in the ventral human brain that connects parietal, temporal and occipital regions to frontal cortex. It has been implicated in a range of functions, including language, semantics, inhibition and the control of action. Recent research shows that th...

Auditory language comprehension recruits cortical regions that are both close to sensory-motor landmarks (supporting auditory and motor features) and far from these landmarks (supporting word meaning). We investigated whether the responsiveness of these regions in task-based functional MRI is related to individual differences in their physical dist...

Semantic control allows us to focus semantic activation on currently relevant aspects of knowledge, even in the face of competition or when the required information is weakly encoded. Diverse cortical regions, including left prefrontal and posterior temporal cortex, are implicated in semantic control, however; the relative contribution of these reg...

Understanding how thought emerges from the topographical structure of the cerebral cortex is a primary goal of cognitive neuroscience. Recent work has revealed a principal gradient of intrinsic connectivity capturing the separation of sensory-motor cortex from transmodal regions of the default mode network (DMN); this is thought to facilitate memor...

The hub and spoke model of semantic cognition proposes that conceptual representations in a heteromodal 'hub' interact with and emerge from modality-specific features or 'spokes', including valence (whether a concept is positive or negative), along with visual and auditory features. As a result, valence congruency might facilitate our ability to li...

Background: Collation of aphasia research data across settings, countries and study designs using big data principles will support analyses across different language modalities, levels of impairment, and therapy interventions in this heterogeneous population. Big data approaches in aphasia research may support vital analyses, which are unachievable...

While reading, our mind can wander to unrelated autobiographical information, creating a perceptually decoupled state detrimental to narrative comprehension. To understand how this mind-wandering state emerges, we asked whether retrieving autobiographical content necessitates functional disengagement from visual input. In Experiment 1, brain activi...

Decomposition of whole-brain functional connectivity patterns reveals a principal gradient that captures the separation of sensorimotor cortex from heteromodal regions in the default mode network (DMN). Functional homotopy is strongest in sensorimotor areas, and weakest in heteromodal cortices, suggesting there may be differences between the left a...

Background and Purpose Optimizing speech and language therapy (SLT) regimens for maximal aphasia recovery is a clinical research priority. We examined associations between SLT intensity (hours/week), dosage (total hours), frequency (days/week), duration (weeks), delivery (face to face, computer supported, individual tailoring, and home practice), c...

How concepts are coded in the brain is a core issue in cognitive neuroscience. Studies have focused on how individual concepts are processed, but the way in which conceptual representation changes to suit the context is unclear. We parametrically manipulated the association strength between words, presented in pairs one word at a time using a slow...

While memory is known to play a key role in creativity, previous studies have not isolated the critical component processes and networks. We asked participants to generate links between words that ranged from strongly related to completely unrelated in long-term memory, delineating the neurocognitive processes that underpin more unique versus stere...

Control processes allow us to constrain the retrieval of semantic information from long-term memory so that it is appropriate for the task or context. Control demands are influenced by the strength of the target information itself and by the circumstances in which it is retrieved, with more control needed when relatively weak aspects of knowledge a...

Semantic cognition allows us to make sense of our varied experiences, including the words we hear and the objects we see. Contemporary accounts identify multiple interacting components that underpin semantic cognition, including diverse unimodal “spoke” systems that are integrated by a heteromodal “hub”, and control processes that allow us to acces...

Recent insights show that increased motivation can benefit executive control, but this effect has not been explored in relation to semantic cognition. Patients with deficits of controlled semantic retrieval in the context of semantic aphasia (SA) after stroke may benefit from this approach since ‘semantic control’ is considered an executive process...

Patients with semantic aphasia have impaired control of semantic retrieval, often accompanied by executive dysfunction following left hemisphere stroke. Many but not all of these patients have damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus, important for semantic and cognitive control. Yet semantic and cognitive control networks are highly distributed,...

The cerebrum comprises a set of specialised systems that tile across the cortical sheet, forming a tapestry-like configuration. For example, the multiple-demand and language-specific systems occupy largely separate neural estates and exhibit disparate functional profiles. Although delimiting the boundary between systems informs where cortical sheet...

It is challenging to specify the role of the default mode network (DMN) in human behaviour. Contemporary theories, based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), suggest that the DMN is insulated from the external world, which allows it to support perceptually-decoupled states and to integrate external and internal information in the constru...

According to a constructionist model of emotion, conceptual knowledge plays a foundational role in emotion perception; reduced availability of relevant conceptual knowledge should therefore impair emotion perception. Conceptual deficits can follow both degradation of semantic knowledge (e.g., semantic ‘storage’ deficits in semantic dementia) and de...

Working memory (WM) allows goal-relevant information to be encoded and maintained in mind, even when the contents of WM are incongruent with the immediate environment. While regions of heteromodal cortex are important for WM, the neural mechanisms that relate to individual differences in the encoding and maintenance of goal-relevant information rem...

Patients with semantic aphasia have impaired control of semantic retrieval, often accompanied by executive dysfunction, following left hemisphere stroke. Many but not all of these patients have damage to left inferior frontal gyrus, important for semantic and cognitive control. Yet semantic and cognitive control networks are highly distributed, inc...

Understanding how age-related changes in cognition manifest in the real world is an important goal. One means of capturing these changes involves “experience sampling” participant’s self-reported thoughts. Research has shown age-related changes in ongoing thought: e.g., older adults have fewer thoughts unrelated to the here-and-now. However, it is...

Significance Since the emergence of COVID-19, lockdowns have been imposed across the globe. These lockdowns change daily life considerably, reducing opportunities to socialize and work. The current study investigated how these changes may impact people’s ongoing thought patterns by examining experience-sampling data gathered before and during the U...

According to a constructionist model of emotion, conceptual knowledge plays a foundational role in emotion perception; reduced availability of relevant conceptual knowledge should therefore impair emotion perception. Conceptual deficits can follow both degradation of semantic knowledge (e.g., semantic ‘storage’ deficits in semantic dementia) and de...

The default mode network (DMN) is a set of widely distributed brain regions in the parietal, temporal and frontal cortex. These regions often show reductions in activity during attention-demanding tasks but increase their activity across multiple forms of complex cognition, many of which are linked to memory or abstract thought. Within the cortex,...

The flexible retrieval of knowledge is critical in everyday situations involving problem solving, reasoning and social interaction. Current theories emphasise the importance of a left-lateralised semantic control network (SCN) in supporting flexible semantic behaviour, while a bilateral multiple-demand network (MDN) is implicated in executive funct...

Recent insights show increased motivation can benefit executive control, but this effect has not been explored in relation to semantic cognition. Patients with deficits of controlled semantic retrieval in the context of semantic aphasia (SA) after stroke may benefit from this approach since their deficits tend to be accompanied by deficits of cogni...

How concepts are coded in the brain is a core issue in cognitive neuroscience. Studies have focused on how individual concepts are processed, but how conceptual representation changes to suit the context is unclear. We parametrically manipulated the association strength between words, presented in pairs one word at a time using a slow event-related...

Previous research suggests that patterns of ongoing thought are heterogeneous, varying across situations and individuals. The current study investigated the influence of multiple tasks and affective style on ongoing patterns of thought. We used 9 different tasks and measured ongoing thought using multidimensional experience sampling. A Principal Co...

The categorisation of long-term memory into semantic and episodic systems has been an influential catalyst for research on human memory organisation. However, the impact of variable cognitive control demands on this classical distinction remains to be elucidated. Across two independent experiments, here we directly compare neural processes for the...

Background and Purpose The factors associated with recovery of language domains after stroke remain uncertain. We described recovery of overall-language-ability, auditory comprehension, naming, and functional-communication across participants’ age, sex, and aphasia chronicity in a large, multilingual, international aphasia dataset. Methods Individ...

Semantic therapy in post-stroke aphasia typically focusses on strengthening links between conceptual representations and their lexical-articulatory forms to aid word retrieval. However, research has shown that semantic deficits in this group can affect both verbal and non-verbal tasks, particularly in patients with deregulated retrieval as opposed...

We used a semantic feature matching task combined with multivoxel pattern decoding to test contrasting accounts of the role of the default mode network (DMN) in cognitive flexibility. By one view, DMN and multiple-demand cortex have opposing roles in cognition - with DMN and multiple-demand regions within the dorsal attention network (DAN) supporti...

Prior research has shown a role of the medial temporal lobe, particularly the hippocampal-parahippocampal complex, in spatial cognition. Here, we developed a new paradigm, the conformational shift spatial task (CSST), which examines the ability to encode and retrieve spatial relations between unrelated items. This task is short, uses symbolic cues,...

We used a semantic feature matching task combined with multivoxel pattern decoding to test contrasting accounts of the role of the default mode network (DMN) in cognitive flexibility. By one view, DMN and multiple-demand cortex have opposing roles in cognition – with DMN and multiple-demand regions within the dorsal attention network (DAN) supporti...

Decomposition of whole-brain functional connectivity patterns reveals a principal gradient that captures the separation of sensorimotor cortex from heteromodal regions in the default mode network (DMN); this gradient captures the systematic order of networks on the cortical surface. Functional homotopy is strongest in sensorimotor areas, and weakes...

We investigated whether semantic context effects in speech production and comprehension are sensitive to language dominance and whether they involve domaingeneral executive control. We indexed these effects using semantic blocking within the cyclical semantic paradigm (corresponding to poorer performance in semantically related contexts compared to...

A core goal in cognitive neuroscience is identifying the physical substrates of the patterns of thought that occupy our daily lives. Contemporary views suggest that the landscape of ongoing experience is heterogeneous and can be influenced by features of both the person and the context. This perspective piece considers recent work that explicitly a...

When unoccupied by an explicit external task, humans engage in a wide range of different types of self-generated thinking. These are often unrelated to the immediate environment and have unique psychological features. Although contemporary perspectives on ongoing thought recognise the heterogeneity of these self-generated states, we lack both a cle...

The flexible retrieval of knowledge is critical in everyday situations involving problem solving, reasoning and social interaction. Current theories have emphasised the importance of a left-lateralised semantic control network (SCN) in supporting flexible semantic behaviour. Apart from the SCN, a bilateral multiple-demand network (MDN) is implicate...

Contemporary neuroscientific accounts suggest that ventral anterior temporal lobe (ATL) acts as a bilateral heteromodal semantic hub, which is particularly critical for the specific-level knowledge needed to recognise unique entities, such as familiar landmarks and faces. There may also be graded functional differences between left and right ATL, r...

A bstract Prior research has shown that structures of the mesiotemporal lobe, particularly the hippocampal-parahippocampal complex, are engaged in different forms of spatial cognition. Here, we developed a new paradigm, the Conformational Shift Spatial task (CSST), which examines the ability to encode and retrieve spatial relations between three un...

While reading, the mind can wander to unrelated autobiographical information, creating a perceptually-decoupled state detrimental to narrative comprehension. To understand how this mind-wandering state emerges, we asked whether retrieving autobiographical content necessitates functional disengagement from visual input. In Experiment 1, brain activi...

Semantic retrieval is flexible, allowing us to focus on subsets of features and associations that are relevant to the current task or context: for example, we use taxonomic relations to locate items in the supermarket (carrots are a vegetable), but thematic associations to decide which tools we need when cooking (carrot goes with peeler). We used f...

Background The ability to efficiently select specific aspects of our semantic representations that are relevant for current goals or the context is supported by semantic control processes (controlled semantic cognition framework). This semantic control component is impaired in patients with semantic aphasia, who have multimodal semantic impairment...

Previous research suggests that patterns of ongoing thought are heterogeneous, varying across situations and individuals. The current study investigated the influence of a wide range of tasks and individual affective style on ongoing patterns of thought. In total, we used 9 different tasks and measured ongoing thought using multidimensional experie...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Conscious awareness of the world fluctuates, either through variation in how vividly we perceive the environment, or when our attentional focus shifts away from information in the external environment towards information that we generate via imagination. Our study combined individual differences in experience sampling, psychophysical reports of per...

Purpose: Speech and language pathology (SLP) for aphasia is a complex intervention delivered to a heterogeneous population within diverse settings. Simplistic descriptions of participants and interventions in research hinder replication, interpretation of results, guideline and research developments through secondary data analyses. This study aimed...

Features of ongoing experience are common across individuals and cultures. However, certain people express specific patterns of thought to a greater extent than others. Contemporary psychological theory assumes that individual differences in thought patterns occur because different types of experience depend on the expression of different neurocogn...

While the multiple-demand network plays an established role in cognitive flexibility, the role of default mode network is more poorly understood. In this study, we used a semantic feature matching task combined with multivoxel pattern decoding to test contrasting functional accounts. By one view, default mode and multiple-demand networks have oppos...