No abstract

Woodhead et al. present results from a randomized trial of a novel reading therapy app (‘iReadMore’) coupled with anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in patients with post-stroke central alexia. Use of iReadMore improves reading accuracy for trained words, while concurrent tDCS facilitates training and improves generalization to untrained stimuli.

Stories play a fundamental role in human culture. they provide a mechanism for sharing cultural identity, imparting knowledge, revealing beliefs, reinforcing social bonds and providing entertainment that is central to all human societies. Here we investigated the extent to which the delivery medium of a story (audio or visual) affected self-reported and physiologically measured engagement with the narrative. Although participants self-reported greater involvement for watching video relative to listening to auditory scenes, stronger physiological responses were recorded for auditory stories. Sensors placed at their wrists showed higher and more variable heart rates, greater electrodermal activity, and even higher body temperatures. We interpret these findings as evidence that the stories were more cognitively and emotionally engaging at a physiological level when presented in an auditory format. this may be because listening to a story, rather than watching a video, is a more active process of co-creation, and that this imaginative process in the listener's mind is detectable on the skin at their wrist. Stories help us make sense of the world. Narratives provide links to traditions, legends, archetypes, myths, and symbols and help connect us to others by forming and stabilizing social bonds, by reinforcing and enhancing the group's memory, and by providing shared entertainment. Our oldest narratives date back many thousands of years and pre-date the advent of writing. For the majority of human history, stories were synonymous with the oral tradition; audiences listened to a story teller imparting a tale. In modern cultures, stories are just as important but now are delivered in a variety of mediums including written books (both physical and digital), videos (TV and films), and as auditory narratives. Here we investigated the extent to which the medium of a story (audio or visual) affected one's engagement with the narrative. "Engagement" is construed very differently across the literature 1-4. In some cases, it refers to cognitive operations such as attention, effort or agency when performing a task 1,2 while in others it refers more generally to participation in activities 3,4. In this paper, we operationalize engagement in two ways: self-reported engagement of a narrative experience and physiological engagement as an indirect measure of the mental processing that generated that experience. A good story takes the listener on a journey, evoking cognitive and emotional responses such that the listener experiences the story through a process of mental simulation of the people, events, actions, places and emotions from the narrative, as if these were being experienced directly 5-7. Indeed, there is evidence that narratives recreate a similar pattern of brain activity in the listener that was produced by the storyteller. Silbert et al. 8 used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brain of a volunteer speaking a 15-min personal story. Another set of volunteers then listened to this story while having...

In Japanese, the same word can be written in either morphographic Kanji or syllabographic Hiragana and this provides a unique opportunity to disentangle a word's lexical frequency from the frequency of its visual form - an important distinction for understanding the neural information processing in regions engaged by reading. Behaviorally, participants responded more quickly to high than low frequency words and to visually familiar relative to less familiar words, independent of script. Critically, the imaging results showed that visual familiarity, as opposed to lexical frequency, had a strong effect on activation in ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Activation here was also greater for Kanji than Hiragana words and this was not due to their inherent differences in visual complexity. These findings can be understood within a predictive coding framework in which vOT receives bottom-up information encoding complex visual forms and top-down predictions from regions encoding non-visual attributes of the stimulus.

In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is, reasoning that, on average, these males will feel that relatively and subjectively their own penis was smaller; compared to those told that the average penis size was smaller than true average. We then asked them to rate how much they would like to own a sports car. These facts and questions were buried amongst other items giving information and asking for product ratings, so that our hypothesis was masked from participants. We found that males, and males over 30 in particular, rated sports cars as more desirable when they were made to feel that they had a small penis.