A growing body of evidence suggests that semantic access is obligatory. Several studies have demonstrated that brain activity associated with semantic processing, measured in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), is elicited even by meaningless, orthographically illegal strings, suggesting that semantic access is not gated…

The medial temporal lobes (MTL) support declarative memory and mature structurally and functionally during the postnatal years in humans. Although recent work has addressed the development of declarative memory in early childhood, less is known about continued development beyond this period of time. The purpose of this investigation was to explore…

Recent research has demonstrated that Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects the visual sensory pathways, producing a variety of visual deficits, including the capacity to perceive structure-from-motion (SFM). Because the sensory areas of the adult brain are known to retain a large degree of plasticity, the present study was conducted to explore whether…

The ability to select an appropriate motor response by resolving competition among alternative responses plays a major role in cognitive performance. fMRI studies suggest that the development of this skill is related to the maturation of the frontal cortex that underlies the improvement of motor inhibition abilities. However, fMRI cannot…

One of the central challenges in mastering English is becoming sensitive to consistency from spelling to sound (i.e. phonological consistency) and from sound to spelling (i.e. orthographic consistency). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the neural correlates of consistency in 9-15-year-old Normal and Impaired Readers…