Ethical Standards Of The 1964 Declaration Of Helsinky

Methods

Subjects

Twenty right-handed healthy young adults (10 females, mean age = 25.33 years, s.d. = 2.79, range = 21-29) with no history of psychiatric or neurological disorders or abnormal brain morphology participated in the experiment. All subjects were native Italian speakers and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Participants gave written informed consent to participate in the experiment, in accordance with guidelines set by Human Studies Committee of “G. D’Annunzio” University, Chieti. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinky.

Neuropsychological testing

All data were collected in at the Institute of Technology and Advanced Bioimaging (ITAB). To get a comprehensive neuropsychological

In this study subjects performed a covert orthographically-cued WGT. The paradigm consisted of six 14.5 s blocks of task performance interspersed with 14.5 s of rest periods. During the task period, subjects saw a red letter for 1 s on a black background at the center of the screen, followed by a white fixation cross during which subjects were instructed to covertly generate as many words as possible that start with the displayed letter. After 13.5 s a red cross presented for 1 s and followed by a white fixation cross marked the beginning of a rest period, during which subjects were instructed to relax and fixate on a central white

VGT is a commonly used language task in fMRI studies and the most used for the assessment of hemispheric lateralization (). As for the WGT, we used a covert orthographically-cued block-design task. This lexical retrieval VGT consisted of five active blocks (verb generation) of 16 s each, five control blocks of 16 s and five fixation blocks of 14 s as a low-level baseline condition. Active and control blocks were presented alternatively, and between them fixation blocks were included, during which subjects were asked to relax and maintain central fixation. During the active period a noun was presented for 1 s in white letters on a black background at the center of the screen, followed by a 1 s white fixation cross during which subjects were instructed to think of pronouncing one associated verb. Eight nouns were presented each active block. Stimuli were selected from the list of words used by Crescentini et al. (2008). During the control period an illegal letter string was presented for 1 s, followed by a 1 s white fixation cross during which subjects were instructed to maintain central fixation. Eight illegal letter strings, balanced for length with those of the active blocks, were presented for each control