John Gabrieli - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by John Gabrieli

Background / Purpose: Here, using fMRI we study the resting state functional connectivity alterat... more Background / Purpose: Here, using fMRI we study the resting state functional connectivity alterations in autism. Main conclusion: Major alterations in the resting state functional connectivity were observed.

Background: Joint attention is the process by which two people actively coordinate their attentio... more Background: Joint attention is the process by which two people actively coordinate their attention on an object. One member of a dyad initiates joint attention on an object while the other person responds to joint attention. This powerful social learning tool is impaired in individuals with autism and is predictive of later language and social developments. Only recently have the neural bases of this pivotal skill been examined and no prior study has explicitly examined the neural bases of initiating and responding to joint attention in individuals with autism using functional MRI. Objectives: To identify the neural bases of initiating and responding to joint attention in typical adults and to examine how these differ in adults with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s disorder. Methods: For Experiment 1, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected from 22 typical adults with no known neurological impairments during a real-time face-to-face interactive game de...

Accounting for phonetic variability across talkers is a core challenge in speech perception. Cogn... more Accounting for phonetic variability across talkers is a core challenge in speech perception. Cognitive models of word recognition address variability by employing either episodic or talker-normalization based approaches. In developmental dyslexia, a "phonological deficit" is thought to impair the acquisition of typical reading ability; however, no connection has yet been made between such a phonological deficit and speech perception behavior, which appears intact in dyslexia. We demonstrate differences between dyslexic listeners and controls in two tasks involving processing phonetic variability: First, dyslexics exhibited impaired talker identification abilities in a familiar language but not a foreign one. Second, the brains of individuals with dyslexia exhibited reduced hemodynamic adaptation – a neural index of talker normalization – compared to typical readers. Together, these results suggest speech perception in dyslexia relies primarily on episodic processes, and th...

Neuropsychologia

The double-deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that both rapid naming and phonological impairme... more The double-deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that both rapid naming and phonological impairments can cause reading difficulties, and that individuals who have both of these deficits show greater reading impairments compared to those with a single deficit. Despite extensive behavioral research, the brain basis of poor reading with a double-deficit has never been investigated. The goal of the study was to evaluate the double-deficit hypothesis using functional MRI. Activation patterns during a printed word rhyme judgment task in 90 children with a wide range of reading abilities showed dissociation between brain regions that were sensitive to phonological awareness (left inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions) and rapid naming (right cerebellar lobule VI). More specifically, the double-deficit group showed less activation in the fronto-parietal reading network compared to children with only a deficit in phonological awareness, who in turn showed less activation than the ty...

European Neuropsychopharmacology, 2014

PloS one, 2015

We investigated differences in the intrinsic functional brain organization (functional connectivi... more We investigated differences in the intrinsic functional brain organization (functional connectivity) of the human reward system between healthy control participants and patients with social anxiety disorder. Functional connectivity was measured in the resting-state via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). 53 patients with social anxiety disorder and 33 healthy control participants underwent a 6-minute resting-state fMRI scan. Functional connectivity of the reward system was analyzed by calculating whole-brain temporal correlations with a bilateral nucleus accumbens seed and a ventromedial prefrontal cortex seed. Patients with social anxiety disorder, relative to the control group, had (1) decreased functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens seed and other regions associated with reward, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex; (2) decreased functional connectivity between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex seed and lateral prefrontal regions, including the anter...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1999

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014

ABSTRACT Learning to perceive foreign language speech sounds is a core challenge in adult second ... more ABSTRACT Learning to perceive foreign language speech sounds is a core challenge in adult second language acquisition. Previous research has considered how listeners learn novel foreign language categories for a known phonetic continuum [e.g., voice onset time (VOT)], or how listeners learn to use a previously unattended phonetic feature (e.g., F3). We investigated perceptual learning of the Korean three-way plosive contrast (lenis, aspirated, and fortis) by native English speakers. Unlike VOT continua in other languages, this contrast is distinguished by complex trading relations between VOT and pitch, with place of articulation differences in VOT adding further complexity. In this study, participants (N = 38) learned a vocabulary of 18 Korean pseudowords comprised of six minimal triplets (e.g., pan, ban, and ppan) by undergoing four days of high-variability (multi-talker) training on a lexical identification task. Mixture model analysis suggested two learner groups: (1) two-thirds of the participants were partially successful at learning words beginning with the fortis stops, but did not differentiate the lenis and aspirated stops; and (2) one-third of the participants successfully learned words beginning with the fortis stops, and exhibited progress distinguishing the lenis and aspirated stops. (Fortis stops most closely resembled listeners' existing English voiced stop categories.) Both groups acquired these contrasts best for bilabial stops and least accurately for alveolar stops.

PloS one, 2015

A large corpus of research suggests that there are changes in the manner and degree to which the ... more A large corpus of research suggests that there are changes in the manner and degree to which the amygdala supports cognitive and emotional function across development. One possible basis for these developmental differences could be the maturation of amygdalar connections with the rest of the brain. Recent functional connectivity studies support this conclusion, but the structural connectivity of the developing amygdala and its different nuclei remains largely unstudied. We examined age related changes in the DWI connectivity fingerprints of the amygdala to the rest of the brain in 166 individuals of ages 5-30. We also developed a model to predict age based on individual-subject amygdala connectivity, and identified the connections that were most predictive of age. Finally, we segmented the amygdala into its four main nucleus groups, and examined the developmental changes in connectivity for each nucleus. We observed that with age, amygdalar connectivity becomes increasingly sparse a...

Restorative neurology and neuroscience, 2007

Developmental dyslexia, characterized by unexpected difficulty in reading, may involve a fundamen... more Developmental dyslexia, characterized by unexpected difficulty in reading, may involve a fundamental deficit in processing rapid acoustic stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we previously reported that adults with developmental dyslexia have a disruption in neural response to rapid acoustic stimuli in left prefrontal cortex. Here we examined the neural correlates of rapid auditory processing in children. Whole-brain fMRI was performed on twenty-two children with developmental dyslexia and twenty-three typical-reading children while they listened to nonlinguistic acoustic stimuli, with either rapid or slow transitions, designed to mimic the spectro-temporal structure of consonant-vowel-consonant speech syllables. Typical-reading children showed activation for rapid compared to slow transitions in left prefrontal cortex. Children with developmental dyslexia did not show any differential response in these regions to rapid versus slow transitions. After eight wee...

Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 1989

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) displayed a different pattern of cognitive deficit fro... more Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) displayed a different pattern of cognitive deficit from patients with dementia resulting from Alzheimer's disease (AD). Specifically, PD patients, whether or not impaired on a mental status examination, had deficient Picture Arrangement but normal Vocabulary test scores whereas AD patients were impaired on both measures. Furthermore, PD patients with impaired mental status examination scores showed a deficit in set formation on Picture Arrangement not seen in the AD patients. Finally, when recent memory performance, as measured by the Wechsler Memory Scale, was predicted from an estimated IQ, 71% of PD patients who had normal mental status examination scores were seen to have at least a mild memory impairment.

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), Jan 26, 2015

A fundamental and largely unanswered question in neuroscience is whether extrinsic connectivity a... more A fundamental and largely unanswered question in neuroscience is whether extrinsic connectivity and function are closely related at a fine spatial grain across the human brain. Using a novel approach, we found that the anatomical connectivity of individual gray-matter voxels (determined via diffusion-weighted imaging) alone can predict functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to 4 visual categories (faces, objects, scenes, and bodies) in individual subjects, thus accounting for both functional differentiation across the cortex and individual variation therein. Furthermore, this approach identified the particular anatomical links between voxels that most strongly predict, and therefore plausibly define, the neural networks underlying specific functions. These results provide the strongest evidence to date for a precise and fine-grained relationship between connectivity and function in the human brain, raise the possibility that early-developing connectivity patterns may...

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2010

Regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in memory form... more Regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in memory formation for scenes in both children and adults. The development in children and adolescents of successful memory encoding for scenes has been associated with increased activation in PFC, but not MTL, regions. However, evidence suggests that a functional subregion of the MTL that supports scene perception, located in the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), goes through a prolonged maturation process. Here we tested the hypothesis that maturation of scene perception supports the development of memory for complex scenes. Scenes were characterized by their levels of complexity defined by the number of unique object categories depicted in the scene. Recognition memory improved with age, in participants ages 8-24, for high-, but not low-, complexity scenes. High-complexity compared to low-complexity scenes activated a network of regions including the posterior PHG. The difference in activations for hig...

Cell, Jan 24, 2003

, in this issue of Cell, integrate genetics and functional brain imaging by showing that variatio... more , in this issue of Cell, integrate genetics and functional brain imaging by showing that variation in the human brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene is associated with variation in episodic memory ability and in hippocampal neurochemistry and function.

Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society : JINS, 2001

This study examined the distinction between identification and production processes in repetition... more This study examined the distinction between identification and production processes in repetition priming for 16 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 16 healthy old control participants (NC). Words were read in three study phases. In three test phases, participants (1) reread studied words, along with unstudied words, in a word-naming task (identification priming); (2) completed 3-letter stems of studied and unstudied words into words in a word-stem completion task (production priming); and (3) answered yes or no to having read studied and unstudied words in a recognition task (explicit memory). Explicit memory and word-stem completion priming were impaired in the AD group compared to the NC group. After correcting for baseline slowing, word-naming priming magnitude did not differ between the groups. The results suggest that the distinction between production and identification processes has promise for explaining the pattern of preservation and failure of repetition primi...

Nature neuroscience, 2001

Many studies have shown that people remember faces of their own race better than faces of other r... more Many studies have shown that people remember faces of their own race better than faces of other races. We investigated the neural substrates of same-race memory superiority using functional MRI (fMRI). European-American (EA) and African-American (AA) males underwent fMRI while they viewed photographs of AA males, EA males and objects under intentional encoding conditions. Recognition memory was superior for same-race versus other-race faces. Individually defined areas in the fusiform region that responded preferentially to faces had greater response to same-race versus other-race faces. Across both groups, memory differences between same-race and other-race faces correlated with activation in left fusiform cortex and right parahippocampal and hippocampal areas. These results suggest that differential activation in fusiform regions contributes to same-race memory superiority.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2000

The role of the amygdala in enhancing declarative memory for emotional experiences has been inves... more The role of the amygdala in enhancing declarative memory for emotional experiences has been investigated in a number of animal, patient, and brain imaging studies. Brain imaging studies, in particular, have found a correlation between amygdala activation during encoding and subsequent memory. Because of the design of these studies, it is unknown whether this correlation is based on individual differences between participants or within-subject variations in moment-to-moment amygdala activation related to individual stimuli. In this study, participants saw neutral and negative scenes and indicated how emotionally intense they found each scene. Separate functional magnetic resonance imaging responses in the amygdala for each scene were related to the participants' report of their experience at study and to performance in an unexpected memory test 3 weeks after scanning. The amygdala had the greatest response to scenes rated as most emotionally intense. The degree of activity in the...

Background / Purpose: Here, using fMRI we study the resting state functional connectivity alterat... more Background / Purpose: Here, using fMRI we study the resting state functional connectivity alterations in autism. Main conclusion: Major alterations in the resting state functional connectivity were observed.

Background: Joint attention is the process by which two people actively coordinate their attentio... more Background: Joint attention is the process by which two people actively coordinate their attention on an object. One member of a dyad initiates joint attention on an object while the other person responds to joint attention. This powerful social learning tool is impaired in individuals with autism and is predictive of later language and social developments. Only recently have the neural bases of this pivotal skill been examined and no prior study has explicitly examined the neural bases of initiating and responding to joint attention in individuals with autism using functional MRI. Objectives: To identify the neural bases of initiating and responding to joint attention in typical adults and to examine how these differ in adults with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s disorder. Methods: For Experiment 1, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected from 22 typical adults with no known neurological impairments during a real-time face-to-face interactive game de...

Accounting for phonetic variability across talkers is a core challenge in speech perception. Cogn... more Accounting for phonetic variability across talkers is a core challenge in speech perception. Cognitive models of word recognition address variability by employing either episodic or talker-normalization based approaches. In developmental dyslexia, a "phonological deficit" is thought to impair the acquisition of typical reading ability; however, no connection has yet been made between such a phonological deficit and speech perception behavior, which appears intact in dyslexia. We demonstrate differences between dyslexic listeners and controls in two tasks involving processing phonetic variability: First, dyslexics exhibited impaired talker identification abilities in a familiar language but not a foreign one. Second, the brains of individuals with dyslexia exhibited reduced hemodynamic adaptation – a neural index of talker normalization – compared to typical readers. Together, these results suggest speech perception in dyslexia relies primarily on episodic processes, and th...

Neuropsychologia

The double-deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that both rapid naming and phonological impairme... more The double-deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that both rapid naming and phonological impairments can cause reading difficulties, and that individuals who have both of these deficits show greater reading impairments compared to those with a single deficit. Despite extensive behavioral research, the brain basis of poor reading with a double-deficit has never been investigated. The goal of the study was to evaluate the double-deficit hypothesis using functional MRI. Activation patterns during a printed word rhyme judgment task in 90 children with a wide range of reading abilities showed dissociation between brain regions that were sensitive to phonological awareness (left inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions) and rapid naming (right cerebellar lobule VI). More specifically, the double-deficit group showed less activation in the fronto-parietal reading network compared to children with only a deficit in phonological awareness, who in turn showed less activation than the ty...

European Neuropsychopharmacology, 2014

PloS one, 2015

We investigated differences in the intrinsic functional brain organization (functional connectivi... more We investigated differences in the intrinsic functional brain organization (functional connectivity) of the human reward system between healthy control participants and patients with social anxiety disorder. Functional connectivity was measured in the resting-state via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). 53 patients with social anxiety disorder and 33 healthy control participants underwent a 6-minute resting-state fMRI scan. Functional connectivity of the reward system was analyzed by calculating whole-brain temporal correlations with a bilateral nucleus accumbens seed and a ventromedial prefrontal cortex seed. Patients with social anxiety disorder, relative to the control group, had (1) decreased functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens seed and other regions associated with reward, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex; (2) decreased functional connectivity between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex seed and lateral prefrontal regions, including the anter...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1999

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014

ABSTRACT Learning to perceive foreign language speech sounds is a core challenge in adult second ... more ABSTRACT Learning to perceive foreign language speech sounds is a core challenge in adult second language acquisition. Previous research has considered how listeners learn novel foreign language categories for a known phonetic continuum [e.g., voice onset time (VOT)], or how listeners learn to use a previously unattended phonetic feature (e.g., F3). We investigated perceptual learning of the Korean three-way plosive contrast (lenis, aspirated, and fortis) by native English speakers. Unlike VOT continua in other languages, this contrast is distinguished by complex trading relations between VOT and pitch, with place of articulation differences in VOT adding further complexity. In this study, participants (N = 38) learned a vocabulary of 18 Korean pseudowords comprised of six minimal triplets (e.g., pan, ban, and ppan) by undergoing four days of high-variability (multi-talker) training on a lexical identification task. Mixture model analysis suggested two learner groups: (1) two-thirds of the participants were partially successful at learning words beginning with the fortis stops, but did not differentiate the lenis and aspirated stops; and (2) one-third of the participants successfully learned words beginning with the fortis stops, and exhibited progress distinguishing the lenis and aspirated stops. (Fortis stops most closely resembled listeners' existing English voiced stop categories.) Both groups acquired these contrasts best for bilabial stops and least accurately for alveolar stops.

PloS one, 2015

A large corpus of research suggests that there are changes in the manner and degree to which the ... more A large corpus of research suggests that there are changes in the manner and degree to which the amygdala supports cognitive and emotional function across development. One possible basis for these developmental differences could be the maturation of amygdalar connections with the rest of the brain. Recent functional connectivity studies support this conclusion, but the structural connectivity of the developing amygdala and its different nuclei remains largely unstudied. We examined age related changes in the DWI connectivity fingerprints of the amygdala to the rest of the brain in 166 individuals of ages 5-30. We also developed a model to predict age based on individual-subject amygdala connectivity, and identified the connections that were most predictive of age. Finally, we segmented the amygdala into its four main nucleus groups, and examined the developmental changes in connectivity for each nucleus. We observed that with age, amygdalar connectivity becomes increasingly sparse a...

Restorative neurology and neuroscience, 2007

Developmental dyslexia, characterized by unexpected difficulty in reading, may involve a fundamen... more Developmental dyslexia, characterized by unexpected difficulty in reading, may involve a fundamental deficit in processing rapid acoustic stimuli. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we previously reported that adults with developmental dyslexia have a disruption in neural response to rapid acoustic stimuli in left prefrontal cortex. Here we examined the neural correlates of rapid auditory processing in children. Whole-brain fMRI was performed on twenty-two children with developmental dyslexia and twenty-three typical-reading children while they listened to nonlinguistic acoustic stimuli, with either rapid or slow transitions, designed to mimic the spectro-temporal structure of consonant-vowel-consonant speech syllables. Typical-reading children showed activation for rapid compared to slow transitions in left prefrontal cortex. Children with developmental dyslexia did not show any differential response in these regions to rapid versus slow transitions. After eight wee...

Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 1989

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) displayed a different pattern of cognitive deficit fro... more Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) displayed a different pattern of cognitive deficit from patients with dementia resulting from Alzheimer's disease (AD). Specifically, PD patients, whether or not impaired on a mental status examination, had deficient Picture Arrangement but normal Vocabulary test scores whereas AD patients were impaired on both measures. Furthermore, PD patients with impaired mental status examination scores showed a deficit in set formation on Picture Arrangement not seen in the AD patients. Finally, when recent memory performance, as measured by the Wechsler Memory Scale, was predicted from an estimated IQ, 71% of PD patients who had normal mental status examination scores were seen to have at least a mild memory impairment.

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), Jan 26, 2015

A fundamental and largely unanswered question in neuroscience is whether extrinsic connectivity a... more A fundamental and largely unanswered question in neuroscience is whether extrinsic connectivity and function are closely related at a fine spatial grain across the human brain. Using a novel approach, we found that the anatomical connectivity of individual gray-matter voxels (determined via diffusion-weighted imaging) alone can predict functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to 4 visual categories (faces, objects, scenes, and bodies) in individual subjects, thus accounting for both functional differentiation across the cortex and individual variation therein. Furthermore, this approach identified the particular anatomical links between voxels that most strongly predict, and therefore plausibly define, the neural networks underlying specific functions. These results provide the strongest evidence to date for a precise and fine-grained relationship between connectivity and function in the human brain, raise the possibility that early-developing connectivity patterns may...

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2010

Regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in memory form... more Regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in memory formation for scenes in both children and adults. The development in children and adolescents of successful memory encoding for scenes has been associated with increased activation in PFC, but not MTL, regions. However, evidence suggests that a functional subregion of the MTL that supports scene perception, located in the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), goes through a prolonged maturation process. Here we tested the hypothesis that maturation of scene perception supports the development of memory for complex scenes. Scenes were characterized by their levels of complexity defined by the number of unique object categories depicted in the scene. Recognition memory improved with age, in participants ages 8-24, for high-, but not low-, complexity scenes. High-complexity compared to low-complexity scenes activated a network of regions including the posterior PHG. The difference in activations for hig...

Cell, Jan 24, 2003

, in this issue of Cell, integrate genetics and functional brain imaging by showing that variatio... more , in this issue of Cell, integrate genetics and functional brain imaging by showing that variation in the human brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene is associated with variation in episodic memory ability and in hippocampal neurochemistry and function.

Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society : JINS, 2001

This study examined the distinction between identification and production processes in repetition... more This study examined the distinction between identification and production processes in repetition priming for 16 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 16 healthy old control participants (NC). Words were read in three study phases. In three test phases, participants (1) reread studied words, along with unstudied words, in a word-naming task (identification priming); (2) completed 3-letter stems of studied and unstudied words into words in a word-stem completion task (production priming); and (3) answered yes or no to having read studied and unstudied words in a recognition task (explicit memory). Explicit memory and word-stem completion priming were impaired in the AD group compared to the NC group. After correcting for baseline slowing, word-naming priming magnitude did not differ between the groups. The results suggest that the distinction between production and identification processes has promise for explaining the pattern of preservation and failure of repetition primi...

Nature neuroscience, 2001

Many studies have shown that people remember faces of their own race better than faces of other r... more Many studies have shown that people remember faces of their own race better than faces of other races. We investigated the neural substrates of same-race memory superiority using functional MRI (fMRI). European-American (EA) and African-American (AA) males underwent fMRI while they viewed photographs of AA males, EA males and objects under intentional encoding conditions. Recognition memory was superior for same-race versus other-race faces. Individually defined areas in the fusiform region that responded preferentially to faces had greater response to same-race versus other-race faces. Across both groups, memory differences between same-race and other-race faces correlated with activation in left fusiform cortex and right parahippocampal and hippocampal areas. These results suggest that differential activation in fusiform regions contributes to same-race memory superiority.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2000

The role of the amygdala in enhancing declarative memory for emotional experiences has been inves... more The role of the amygdala in enhancing declarative memory for emotional experiences has been investigated in a number of animal, patient, and brain imaging studies. Brain imaging studies, in particular, have found a correlation between amygdala activation during encoding and subsequent memory. Because of the design of these studies, it is unknown whether this correlation is based on individual differences between participants or within-subject variations in moment-to-moment amygdala activation related to individual stimuli. In this study, participants saw neutral and negative scenes and indicated how emotionally intense they found each scene. Separate functional magnetic resonance imaging responses in the amygdala for each scene were related to the participants' report of their experience at study and to performance in an unexpected memory test 3 weeks after scanning. The amygdala had the greatest response to scenes rated as most emotionally intense. The degree of activity in the...

Psychological Science, 2014

Cognitive skills predict academic performance, so schools that improve academic performance might... more Cognitive skills predict academic performance, so schools that improve academic performance might also improve cognitive skills. To investigate the impact schools have on both academic performance and cognitive skills, we related standardized achievement test scores to measures of cognitive skills in a large sample (N=1,367) of 8th-grade students attending traditional, exam, and charter public schools. Test scores and gains in test scores over time correlated with measures of cognitive skills. Despite wide variation in test scores across schools, differences in cognitive skills across schools were negligible after controlling for 4th-grade test scores. Random offers of enrollment to over-subscribed charter schools resulted in positive impacts of such school attendance on math achievement, but had no impact on cognitive skills. These findings suggest that schools that improve standardized achievement tests do so primarily through channels other than cognitive skills.