Observing others' actions and imagining oneself performing the same actions (motor imagery) have been linked in the literature in several ways. They have been shown to have overlapping neural representations, both seem to relate to one's ability to move, and both have been shown to positively affect movement rehabilitation. Whether these overlaps reflect a direct functional relationship between motor imagery and the ability to derive relevant information from observed kinematics (action understanding) has not yet been investigated. A previous study found that individuals with low self-reported imagery vividness exhibit weaker motor system engagement during action observation than those with typical imagery vividness. The present study provides the first behavioural test of the relationships between motor and general visual imagery vividness and a quantifiable behavioural measure of action understanding-specifically, the ability to judge the weight of objects based on observing someone else lift them. To test the research question across the full imagery spectrum, our recruitment strategy included a high proportion of individuals with very low imagery vividness (often referred to as 'aphantasia'). An online sample (N = 392) completed a weight judgement task alongside a matched speed judgement control task. Neither motor imagery vividness (Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire-2) nor general visual imagery vividness (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) predicted action understanding, with a Bayesian analysis suggesting moderate evidence against any relationship. Overall, our findings suggest that self-reported motor and general visual imagery vividness are functionally independent from action understanding of manual interactions.

Alpha-band oscillations (8-12 Hz) are a ubiquitous feature of brain activity that profoundly shape neural processing in various domains. The functional role of these oscillations across cortical systems and brain states remains debated. Here, we investigated how pre-stimulus somatosensory alpha shapes somatosensory processing during task-irrelevant tactile stimulation. Thirty-nine participants received electrical finger stimulation while engaged in an unrelated auditory task, and high-density EEG data were recorded. The resulting somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) were stratified into five bins based on pre-stimulus somatosensory alpha power and analyzed using linear mixed-effects modeling and threshold-free cluster-enhanced spatiotemporal analyses. Our results indicate that SEP amplitudes depend on pre-stimulus somatosensory alpha power. The observed effects were spatially localized to contralateral posterocentral and posteroparietal electrodes and temporally extended across multiple SEP components. Pre-stimulus alpha power was non-linearly related to SEP components, with the N250 SEP component showing an inverse U-shaped association, while P200 linearly increased with pre-stimulus alpha band power and other components showed trend-level non-linear associations. These findings provide evidence that alpha oscillations modulate task-irrelevant somatosensory processing in a component-specific and partly non-linear manner, suggesting that spontaneous local oscillatory states contribute to automatic gating of somatosensory processing, independent of task-directed attention.

Humans can create impressive art, make major scientific breakthroughs, and generate creative solutions that solve everyday life problems. But how are these creative activities supported by the brain? This question is of great scientific interest but remains unanswered. New hypotheses, grounded in converging evidence from cognitive neuroscience, are needed to guide breakthroughs in understanding the neural basis of creative thought. It has long been suggested that creativity is a distinct mental function. However, converging clinical-cognitive neuroscience evidence is starting to suggest that creative thought is not functionally distinct but, instead, might arise from general purpose cognitive mechanisms supporting semantic cognition, controlled episodic memory retrieval, and executive mechanisms (i.e., Cognitive Cornerstones Hypothesis; Chan et al., 2023). Results from this large-scale activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis, based on 787 experiments with 10,357 foci from 17,228 healthy adult participants, showed that the brain regions implicated in creativity tasks heavily overlap with the brain regions implicated in the cognitive cornerstones of creative thought (i.e., pre-existing knowledge and executive mechanisms). These striking results suggest that innovative insights will arise from considering the roles of these fundamental cognitive functions and their interactions in supporting creative thought.

Instrumental conditioning (IC) consists in actively learning to approach rewarding stimuli and to avoid punishing stimuli. This central process for adaptation requires a relatively high computational capacity because it entails the integration of knowledge regarding stimuli, behaviours, and outcomes. Recent studies using subliminal exposure show that IC occurs only for consciously perceived stimuli, suggesting that IC may require awareness. In the present study, we investigated whether IC could occur when implicit processing is stimulated not by subliminal exposure but by employing predictive regularities that are complex and difficult to detect consciously. In a novel IC task based on the artificial grammar learning task, participants gave approach (Go) or avoidance responses (No-Go) to strings from two grammars. Unbeknown to them, one of the grammars was associated with rewards while the other was associated with punishments. Trial-by-trial measures assessed participants' awareness of the grammar structures and of their judgments regarding the predictive value of the strings. In both an IC phase and a delayed responding phase, we found that participants (NIC phase = 187; Ndelay = 160) responded adaptively when they were aware of the regularities and, also, when they were not. Importantly, we found reliable evidence that non-conscious regularities produced adaptive responding only when they produced conscious judgments regarding the predictive values of the stimuli. When judgments of predictive values were not conscious, data were insensitive or more consistent with chance performance. This suggests that IC may be produced by a combination of unconscious learning and conscious integration.

Response inhibition is one of the most important control processes in the human brain. The study of the basic neural mechanism(s) underlying response inhibition has produced some of the most-cited empirical work in cognitive neuroscience to date, with a large portion of the most influential work relying on unimodal BOLD-fMRI. More than 25 years after the first fMRI studies of response inhibition, new work using the method to investigate its basic neural mechanisms still appears with regularity. This article seeks to outline why fundamental questions regarding the basic neural mechanism underlying response inhibition still remain unresolved, why new unimodal fMRI work often produces seemingly confusing results, and why experimental comparisons that are vital to understand response inhibition are almost never found in fMRI research. I argue that due to a unique combination of factors - the temporal resolution of BOLD-fMRI, the fundamental behavioral dynamics of laboratory response inhibition tasks, and the specific properties of the underlying neural circuits - the study of response inhibition presents a greater challenge for fMRI than other fields. I will then outline two potential avenues through which the method can remain valuable despite these limitations.

Sentence comprehension requires the rapid construction of hierarchical structure and the integration of non-adjacent dependencies under working-memory constraints. Many people with aphasia (PWA) show difficulty comprehending syntactically complex sentences, yet the neural mechanisms underlying these deficits remain unclear. We examined cortical tracking of two distinct syntactic computations-hierarchical constituent closure (node count) and dependency integration cost-using EEG during a sentence-picture matching task. PWA and neurologically healthy controls listened to subject- and object-relative clause sentences varying in semantic reversibility. Neural alignment with each syntactic predictor was quantified using a conditional mutual information approach controlling for speech acoustics. Node count tracking was stronger for reversible sentences across groups, consistent with increased structural parsing under thematic ambiguity, and node count peaks were wider for PWA than controls specifically for reversible sentences, suggesting more prolonged constituent closure processing. Integration cost tracking was greater for object-relative clauses and exhibited delays under higher retrieval demands. PWA showed significantly earlier integration cost peaks overall, and earlier integration cost latencies predicted poorer comprehension accuracy for reversible object-relative clauses-the condition placing the greatest demands on dependency formation without semantic support. This relationship was consistent at the trial level, with all PWA showing shorter latencies for incorrect than correct responses. Integration cost latency predicted online comprehension accuracy but not performance on a standardized clinical assessment, suggesting that the timing of neural alignment with integration cost captures online dependency-resolution demands not fully reflected in global clinical measures. These preliminary findings highlight the potential of neural tracking measures to reveal structure-specific processing differences in aphasia.

How does the brain transform a confusing perceptual input into a sudden "Aha" experience? To investigate the neurocognitive dynamics of perceptual insight, we employed an embedded Chinese character task in which twenty-six eligible participants judged whether a source character contained a previously presented target. Targets were embedded either in a hidden/intersecting manner or in an unhidden/non-intersecting manner, allowing us to compare successful recognition under different restructuring demands. Matched invalid counterparts were also included as control conditions. Behaviorally, the hidden condition was associated with greater solution difficulty, followed by stronger "Aha" experiences-characterized by heightened surprise and suddenness-upon successful recognition. Electrophysiologically, relative to the unhidden condition, the hidden condition was associated with a more negative frontal N2 and a less positive parietal late positive component (LPC), consistent with differences in conflict-related and restructuring-related processing. Time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) further showed that neural activity reliably distinguished valid-hidden from valid-unhidden trials during a post-stimulus interval (430-480 msec). In addition, lower pre-source alpha power for hidden relative to unhidden trials predicted stronger hidden-relative-to-unhidden increases in Jolt and overall Aha scores. Together, our findings suggest that successful recognition of hidden targets is not merely more difficult perception, but is associated with a distinct phenomenological and neural profile. More broadly, perceptual insight appears to unfold dynamically, from pre-source neural-state differences to later stimulus-driven processing stages during successful recognition.

False discovery rate (FDR) corrections are a popular and pragmatic approach to dealing with the problem of multiple comparisons in neuroimaging research. This paper describes a potentially problematic outcome of FDR correction. Specifically, the use of FDR will tend to promote the publication of poorly controlled experiments. This occurs because the presence of significant hypothesis tests in some parts of the brain will lower the threshold for significance elsewhere in the brain. In general, this adaptive thresholding is a feature of FDR. However, it can be problematic when a confounded design produces spurious activations, because they will lower the threshold for significance elsewhere in the brain, relative to a well-controlled study. Here I demonstrate this basic phenomenon using Monte Carlo simulations. I conduct further simulations to estimate how this phenomenon could affect more realistic confounding scenarios and how it could interact with publication bias. I conclude by suggesting mitigation approaches.

The Arabic Discourse Assessment Tool (ADAT) is a newly developed, standardised, and norm-referenced tool comprising three discourse tasks, eight high-quality discourse measures, and two transcription-less assessment approaches. ADAT can accurately differentiate discourse responses produced by people with aphasia (PwA) from those of neurotypical adults. In this study, we examined the diagnostic accuracy of ADAT in patients with brain damage. We addressed key methodological limitations in the existing literature by: (a) using ADAT to distinguish brain damaged PwA from those without aphasia; (b) diagnosing fluency status among PwA using ADAT; (c) testing the predictive validity of the tool in out-of-sample data; and (d) assessing whether transcription-less discourse assessment approaches can produce similar diagnostic accuracy to traditional, time-consuming discourse sampling. We examined 100 patients with brain damage using ADAT; 50 of whom were diagnosed with aphasia (28 fluent and 22 non-fluent aphasia). Using random-permutation nested cross-validation and bootstrapping, the study demonstrates that the combination of eight ADAT discourse measures can predict aphasia status in brain damaged patients with 90% accuracy, and the two transcription-less, clinically-friendly discourse assessment approaches can predict aphasia status with 88% accuracy. Furthermore, ADAT's discourse measures can diagnose fluency status in PwA with 81% accuracy, and the two transcription-less approaches can diagnose fluency status with 88% accuracy. The findings provide evidence that ADAT, including its discourse measures and transcription-less approaches, can be used to diagnose aphasia in brain damaged individuals and fluency status in PwA with very high accuracy, thus offering clinical applications for early identification and targeted interventions.

The clinical evaluation of semantic knowledge has predominantly relied on tools targeting concrete concepts, whereas abstract knowledge has historically received limited attention despite its importance in everyday communication. Only a few instruments have explored the internal subdivision of abstract knowledge, likely due to the intrinsic difficulty of defining specific types of concepts or dimensions, resulting in a fragmented and heterogeneous neuropsychological assessment framework that limits our understanding of this domain. This systematic review examined the tools used to assess various types of abstract concepts in clinical populations. A literature search has been performed on the electronic databases of PubMed and Google Scholar (last update: October 2025). A total of 17 tests is reviewed, differing in the test characteristics, i.e. ranging from automatic to controlled processes and varying in ecological validity, the type of stimuli employed, and the abstract dimensions explored. Most studies have focused on neurodegenerative patients, while comparatively few have examined other clinical conditions. The risk of bias of the reviewed studies was assessed using an ad hoc developed instrument. This review highlights the need for future research to extend investigations to additional abstract domains and clinical populations, while also identifying key challenges related to stimulus selection and the determination of the most appropriate assessment framework.

Proactive control describes preparatory, anticipatory processes prior to upcoming demands, whereas reactive control is recruited as a late, corrective response to goal interferences. Here, we used fMRI to investigate behavioral and neuronal correlates of proactive and reactive control in major depressive disorder (MDD). Fifty patients and 50 healthy controls performed an antisaccade task with trial-specific central cues informing about the probability of upcoming task demands (antisaccade or prosaccade), thereby manipulating proactive control levels in the cue period. The trial-specific task instruction was contained in the peripheral stimulus, resulting in either congruent or incongruent trials in the saccadic response period to tax reactive control. Saccade stimuli were faces, with differently valenced expressions (negative, positive, neutral) allowing block-wise affective manipulation. Results indicated comparable effects of cue period proactive control in both groups in fronto-parieto-occipital cortex and striatum, including medial frontal and supplementary eye fields. In the response period, incongruent trials evoked enhanced activations in fronto-cingular, parietal and temporal cortex, thalamus and striatum, again without group differences. However, patients with MDD had larger antisaccade amplitudes and lower saccadic peak velocities. Exploratory analysis of a posterior parietal region-of-interest known to be related to non-standard sensorimotor transformations in antisaccades indicated reduced BOLD in patients during the response phase. There were no effects of stimulus valence on any measure. Together, these findings support the role of overlapping fronto-parieto-striatal networks in proactive and reactive control and suggest that in this particular task, such activations may be unaffected by stimulus-induced affective states as well as clinically relevant affective disorder.

A long-standing assumption in cognitive neuroscience is that visual mental imagery (VMI) is "visual perception in reverse" and, as such, requires reactivation of the primary visual cortex (V1). On this view, total destruction of V1 should abolish VMI and provoke neurological aphantasia. We tested this prediction by reviewing 55 published cases of cortical blindness (CB) in which VMI abilities were assessed. Vivid VMI is repeatedly documented in CB patients with complete or near-complete bilateral destruction, disconnection, or functional loss of V1; in impaired-VMI cases with informative anatomical or functional evidence, the lesion extends well beyond V1, typically into left temporal or temporo-occipital cortex. No impaired-VMI case with informative anatomical or functional evidence shows damage confined to V1. These data are difficult to reconcile with a necessary role for V1 in VMI. They are also compatible with, but do not by themselves establish, network accounts that assign an important role to ventral temporal and frontoparietal systems. We outline practical guidelines for future neuropsychological studies of visual mental imagery in CB.

To date, neurobiological accounts of lexical-semantic processing have largely assumed, either explicitly or implicitly, that there is no relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Recently, multiple representation theories have begun to incorporate non-arbitrary relationships in which a word's form resembles its meaning (iconicity). However, non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships occur more extensively within languages as statistical regularities between sublexical phonological/phonetic features and aspects of word meaning (systematicity or typicality). The present study investigated whether brain activity during lexical processing reflects statistical regularities between sublexical features and concrete and abstract concepts (i.e., concreteness form typicality). Twenty-one healthy participants completed an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study while they performed auditory lexical decisions on concrete and abstract words that were highly form-typical. We observed significant activity in a predominantly left-hemisphere network of perisylvian regions previously linked to concrete and abstract word processing. Crucially, the majority of these regions also responded to nonwords constructed with sublexical phonological/phonetic features associated with concreteness, including hub regions proposed to represent amodal conceptual processing. These findings demonstrate that statistical knowledge about non-arbitrary form-meaning mappings constitutes a core component of how concreteness is represented and accessed in the brain. We argue that these results support an account in which concrete and abstract concepts are grounded in the phonetic-acoustic features of language through statistical learning.

A growing literature examines the dimensionality of behavioral deficits in neurological populations using principal component analysis and related methods. Two opposing views have emerged. On one side, behavioral variability after brain injury (e.g., stroke, brain tumors, neurodegeneration) appears intrinsically low-dimensional, often captured by a few components. On the other side, this apparent simplicity has been attributed to lesion anatomy, task impurity, and methodological biases that may underestimate true dimensionality. Here both perspectives are summarized into a domain-dependent reconciliation. Cognitive performance measured with standard neuropsychological batteries may appear low-dimensional partly because tasks share common demands (e.g., attention, language, executive control), and because clinical severity induces correlated deficits that diminish with milder impairment. In contrast, motor behavior may be genuinely low-dimensional, reflecting biomechanical synergies. Thus, dimensionality is not a fixed property but depends on two interacting factors: disease severity and behavioral domain, offering a more nuanced framework for interpreting post-injury cognition.