To minimize permanent postoperative deficits, functional mapping with direct electrical stimulation (DES) is becoming a gold standard when a brain tumor resection must be performed near or within eloquent areas. Due to the devastating impact of communication disabilities, language is one of the most commonly mapped functions. However, standardized linguistic protocols for intraoperative use are still scarce. Here we present the first Russian standardized naming test for mapping noun and verb production during awake neurosurgeries. Its development has been informed by modern (psycho)linguistic knowledge and DES requirements. The test was clinically piloted in a sample of 23 patients who underwent awake craniotomy, with results showing high relevance of the test in combination with DES for mapping language-relevant cortical and subcortical sites. The use of the test intraoperatively enabled extensive resection of tumor tissue while preserving language function in most of the tested patients. The test materials and protocols are freely available online

Visual working memory (VWM) is prone to interference from stored items competing for its limited capacity. These competitive interactions can arise from different sources. For example, one such source is poor item distinctiveness causing a failure to discriminate between items sharing common features. Another source of interference is imperfect binding, a problem of determining which of the remembered features belonged to which object or which item was in which location. In two experiments, we studied how the conceptual distinctiveness of real-world objects (i.e., whether the objects belong to the same or different basic categories) affects VWM for objects and object-location binding. In Experiment 1, we found that distinctiveness did not affect memory for object identities or for locations, but low-distinctive objects were more frequently reported at “swapped” locations that originally went with different objects. In Experiment 2 we found evidence that the effect of distinctiveness on the object-location swaps was due to the use of categorical information for binding. In particular, we found that observers swapped the location of a tested object with another object from the same category more frequently than with any of the objects from another category. This suggests that observers can use some coarse category-location information when objects are conceptually distinct. Taken together, our findings suggest that object distinction and object-location binding act upon different components of VWM.

The distractive effects on attentional task performance in different paradigms are analyzed in this paper. I demonstrate how distractors may negatively affect (interference effect), positively (redundancy effect) or neutrally (null effect). Distractor effects described in literature are classified in accordance with their hypothetical source. The general rule of the theory is also introduced. It contains the formal prediction of the particular distractor effect, based on entropy and redundancy measures from the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon, 1948). Single-vs dual-process frameworks are considered for hypothetical mechanisms which underpin the distractor effects. Distractor profiles (DPs) are also introduced for the formalization and simple visualization of experimental data concerning the distractor effects. Typical shapes of DPs and their interpretations are discussed with examples from three frequently cited experiments. Finally, the paper introduces hierarchical hypothesis that states the level-fashion modulating interrelations between distractor effects of different classes.

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