Concepts contain rich structures that support flexible semantic cognition. These structures can be characterized by patterns of feature covariation: Certain features tend to cluster in the same items (e.g., "feathers," "wings," "can fly"). Existing computational models demonstrate how this kind of structure can be…

Purpose: Sensory gating is a phenomenon where the cortical response to the second stimulus in a pair of identical stimuli is inhibited. It is most often assessed in a conditioning-testing paradigm. Both active and passive neuronal mechanisms have been implicated in sensory gating. The present study aimed to assess if sensory gating is caused by an…

Newborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from the speech input, that is, they show greater brain activation in the bilateral temporal and left inferior frontal regions to trisyllabic pseudowords of the form AAB (e.g., "babamu") than to random ABC sequences (e.g., "bamuge"). Whether this ability is…

Sensory differences are included in the DSM-5 criteria of autism for the first time, yet it is unclear how they relate to neural indicators of perception. We studied early brain signatures of perception and examined their relationship to sensory behaviors and autistic traits. Thirteen autistic children and 13 Typically Developing (TD) children…

Neurofeedback (NF) training is a closed-loop brain training in which participants learn to regulate their neural activation. NF training of alpha (8-12 Hz) activity has been reported to enhance working memory capacity, but whether it affects the precision in working memory has not yet been explored. Moreover, whether NF training distinctively…

Purpose: The present brain--behavior study examined whether sensory registration or neural inhibition processes explained variability in the behavioral most comfortable level (MCL) and background noise level (BNL) components of the acceptable noise level (ANL) measure. Method: A traditional auditory gating paradigm was used to evoke neural…

Rhythmic abilities are impaired in developmental coordination disorder (DCD) but learning deficit of procedural skills implying temporal sequence is still unclear. Current contradictory results suggest that procedural learning deficits in DCD highly depend on learning conditions. The present study proposes to test the role of sensory modality of…

With the rise of bilinguals globally, extensive research has been conducted to understand how bilingualism affects cognitive functions differently from monolingualism, with significant implications for bilingual education, healthcare, and other fields. Specific to language processing, differences have been identified between second language (L2)…

We present a neural network model of referent identification in a visual world task. Inputs are visual representations of item pairs unfolding with sequences of phonemes identifying the target item. The model is trained to output the semantic representation of the target and to suppress the distractor. The training set uses a 200-word lexicon…

Neurologic insults in infancy can have significant long-term effects on developmental processes including attention and learning; however, the heterogeneity of diagnoses and treatments in this population often lead to exclusion from interventional trials to improve outcomes. This study sought to determine whether hospitalized infants with neural…

Purpose: Little is known about the relationship between discourse comprehension and production in traumatic brain injury (TBI), especially for spoken language. This study examined to what extent narrative discourse comprehension accounts for narrative discourse production outcomes (story grammar, story completeness). A secondary aim was to…

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation used for improving cognitive functions via delivering weak electrical stimulation with a certain frequency. This systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the effects of tACS protocols on cognitive functions in healthy young adults. We identified 56…

In an ever-changing environment, survival depends on learning which stimuli represent threat, and also on updating such associations when circumstances shift. It has been claimed that humans can acquire physiological responses to threat-associated stimuli even when they are unaware of them, but the role of awareness in updating threat…

Objectives: This study aimed to determine the cognitive awareness of digital drugs as a phenomenon among Sultan Qaboos University undergraduate students. It also aimed to identify differences based on certain variables such as gender, college affiliation, ownership of social media accounts, and average Internet usage among students. Method: This…

Two aspects of real-world visual search are typically studied in parallel: category knowledge (e.g., searching for food) and visual patterns (e.g., predicting an upcoming street sign from prior street signs). Previous visual search studies have shown that prior category knowledge hinders search when targets and distractors are from the same…