Showing papers by "Patricia A. Carpenter published in 2000"
TL;DR: Neuroimaging studies suggest that some constituent functions, such as maintaining information in active form and manipulating it, are not discretely localized in prefrontal regions, including posterior regions, which suggest a more dynamic and distributed view of the cortical organization of working memory and executive functions.
262 citations
TL;DR: The results indicate that language and visual-spatial processing are supported by partially separable networks of cortical regions and suggests one basis for strategy selection: the minimization of cognitive workload.
191 citations
TL;DR: The comodulation of activation in the prefrontal and parietal areas by the amount of computational demand suggests that the collaboration between areas is a basic feature underlying much of the functionality of spatial working memory.
156 citations
01 Jan 2000
TL;DR: Tomitch et al. as discussed by the authors used fMRI to investigate the amount of brain activation in a set of cortical areas in the task of main idea identification and found that the complex task is associated with increased neural activity in a range of brain regions of both hemispheres, including the temporal lobe, the extrastriate cortex, the parietal lobule and the inferior frontal gyrus.
Abstract: Main Idea Identification: A Functional Imaging Study of a Complex Cognitive Process Leda Maria Braga Tomitch (leda@andrew.cmu.edu) Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Departamento de Lingua e Literaturas Estrangeiras Campus Universitario- Florianopolis-SC 88010-970 BRASIL Marcel Adam Just (just+@cmu.edu) Patricia A. Carpenter (carpenter+@cmu.edu) Carnegie Mellon University Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging 5000 Forbes Ave Pittsburgh-PA 15213 USA Main idea identification is at the very heart of human thinking, being a skill required in everyday situations such as reading a message, interpreting an interlocutor’s utterance, listening to the news and attending a lecture. It is part of the human nature to try to integrate incoming information and build a macrostructure containing the main points of the input, so that this information can be more easily stored in memory and retrieved when needed. Despite its importance in human interaction, the process of main idea identification is yet little understood. Cognitive brain imaging has provided researchers new possibilities for trying to unravel what happens in the human brain during the performance of various complex tasks. This study uses fMRI to investigate the amount of brain activation in a set of cortical areas in the task of main idea identification. Readers were assigned to two types of reading situations, the difficulty of processing being manipulated as follows: in an easier condition, the passages contained the main idea in an introductory topic sentence, followed by two sentences whose content was difficult to interpret in the absence of the topic setting introductory sentence. In a more difficult condition, the two such sentences occurred at the beginning of the passage, and the topic sentence occurred last. The greater cognitive complexity in processing the two abstract sentences prior to knowing the topic was expected to translate into an increase in brain activation in the right hemisphere for the hard condition. Results indicate that the complex task of main idea identification is associated with increased neural activity in a range of brain regions of both hemispheres, including the temporal lobe, the extrastriate cortex, the parietal lobule and the inferior frontal gyrus, regardless of the position of the main idea in the paragraph. Furthermore, particularly prominent activity is found in the temporal regions of both cerebral hemispheres when compared to the other areas. This work was supported by grant BEX0300/99-3 from CAPES-Brasilia-Brasil, grant MH29617 from the National Institute of Mental Health and grant PO1NS35949 from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
2 citations