Lorenzo Vignali

Università degli Studi di Trento | UNITN · CIMEC - Center for Mind/Brain Sciences

Our brain constructs reality through narrative and argumentative thought. Some hypotheses argue that these two modes of cognitive functioning are irreducible, reflecting distinct mental operations underlain by separate neural bases; Others ascribe both to a unitary neural system dedicated to long-timescale information. We addressed this question by...

Objective Several studies report evidence for training-related neuroplasticity in the visual cortex, while other studies suggest that improvements simply reflect inadequate eye fixation control during perimetric prediagnostics and postdiagnostics. Methods and analysis To improve diagnostics, a new eye-tracking-based methodology for visual field an...

How is conceptual knowledge organized and retrieved by the brain? Recent evidence points to the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) as a crucial semantic hub integrating both abstract and concrete conceptual features according to a dorsal-to-medial gradient. It is however unclear when this conceptual gradient emerges and how semantic information reaches t...

The present study investigated the functional role of the posterior parietal cortex during the processing of parafoveally presented letter strings. To this end, we simultaneously presented two letter strings (word or pseudoword)– one foveally and one parafoveally – and asked the participants to indicate the presence of a word (i.e., lexical decisio...

The present fMRI study investigated neural correlates of parafoveal preprocessing during reading and the type of information that is accessible from the upcoming - not yet fixated - word. Participants performed a lexical decision flanker task while the constraints imposed by the first three letters (the initial trigram) of parafoveally presented wo...

The present study investigated oscillatory brain dynamics during self-paced sentence-level processing. Participants read fully correct sentences, sentences containing a semantic violation and “sentences” in which the order of the words was randomized. At the target word level, fixations on semantically unrelated words elicited a lower-beta band (13...