Background: People with right hemisphere damage (PwRHD) are often reported to produce tangential or irrelevant utterances. This may be related to their conversational difficulties, including performance in making relevant responses to questions. Clinical interactions represent a major type of communicative activity that PwRHD frequently attend and…

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI), especially to the right hemisphere, can result in difficulty using or understanding prosodic contours in speech. Prosody is used to convey emotional connotation or linguistic intent and includes pitch, loudness, rate, and voice quality. A disorder in the comprehension or production of prosody is known as…

Handwriting was a therapeutic intervention with an adolescent victim of a serious electrical accident that occurred in 1972. It was initiated two months after the accident as one aspect of educational therapy. The handwriting tasks involved copying numbers, printing letters, copying shapes, practicing cursive letters, writing sentences, and…

Objective: We offer an overview of ADHD research using mouse models of nicotine exposure. Method: Nicotine exposure of C57BL/6 or Swiss Webster mice occurred during prenatal period only or during the prenatal and the preweaning periods. Behavioral, neuroanatomical and neurotransmitter assays were used to investigate neurobiological mechanisms of…

Background: A growing body of literature has demonstrated the importance of discourse assessment in patients who suffered from brain injury, both in the left and right hemispheres, as discourse represents a key component of functional communication. However, little is known about the relationship between gray matter density and macrolinguistic…

Global attention on early child development, inclusive of those with disability, has the potential to translate into improved action for the millions of children with developmental disability living in low- and middle-income countries. Nurturing care is crucial for all children, arguably even more so for children with developmental disability. A…

Pain assessments typically depend on self-report of the pain experience. Yet, in individuals with autism spectrum disorders, this can be an unreliable due to communication difficulties. Importantly, observations of behavioral hypo- and hyperresponsivity to pain suggest altered pain sensitivity in autism spectrum disorder. Neuroimaging may provide…

Purpose: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) commonly causes pragmatic language disorders that are apparent in discourse production. Specific characteristics and approaches to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of these disorders are not well-defined. RHDBank, a shared database of multimedia interactions for the study of communication using…

Recognition memory deficits, even after short delays, are sometimes observed following hippocampal damage. One hypothesis links the hippocampus with processes in updating contextual memory representation. Here, we used fornix transection, which partially disconnects the hippocampal system, and compares the performance of fornix-transected monkeys…

Most introductory textbooks discuss the story of Phineas Gage and his terrible accident in which he survived a three-and-a-half-foot-long tamping iron that weighed 13¼ pounds exploding through his head. Twenty-three current introductory textbooks were analyzed for the accuracy of their coverage of Gage's subsequent (post-accident) history and…

Patients with left hemisphere (LH) or right hemisphere (RH) brain injury due to stroke were tested on a speeded, color discrimination task in which two factors were manipulated: (1) the categorical relationship between the target and the distracters and (2) the visual field in which the target was presented. Similar to controls, the RH patients…

Purpose: Damage to left ventral occipito-temporal cortex can give rise to written language impairment characterized by pure alexia/letter-by-letter (LBL) reading, as well as surface alexia and agraphia. The purpose of this study was to examine the therapeutic effects of a combined treatment approach to address concurrent LBL reading with surface…

Severe and persistent speech disorder, dysarthria, may be present for life after brain injury in childhood, yet the neural correlates of this chronic disorder remain elusive. Although abundant literature is available on language reorganization after lesions in childhood, little is known about the capacity of motor speech networks to reorganize…

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), sometimes referred to as concussion, is one of the most common acquired neurological problems of childhood. When children return to school following mTBI, school psychologists should be actively involved in the determination of neurocognitive and functional deficits for the purpose of designing strength-based…

Memory impairment is a common feature of conditions that involve changes in inflammatory signaling in the brain, including traumatic brain injury, infection, neurodegenerative disorders, and normal aging. However, the causal importance of inflammatory mediators in cognitive impairments in these conditions remains unclear. Here we show that…