Forming and maintaining friendships is one of the most important developmental tasks in adolescence. Supportive and high-quality friendships have been related to positive developmental outcomes and mental health, both concurrently and in the long term. Friendships also protect against negative effects of adverse experiences, such as peer…

Are there really "right-brained" and "left-brained" learners? The argument of left- and right-brain learning is the second most pervasive neuromyth in education. In this article, we debunk this myth by distinguishing fact from fiction. Each hemisphere indeed shows dominance in processing certain types of cognitive function.…

This paper reviews three studies investigating the relationship between brain regions involved in executive control and those involved in reading comprehension in typically-developing teens. In the first study, three regions of posterior left lateral prefrontal cortex (i.e., precentral gyrus, inferior frontal junction, inferior frontal gyrus) were…

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form's linguistic and frequency distribution in second language…

Epigenetic modifications of chromatin structure provide a mechanistic interface for gene-environment interactions that impact the individualization of health trajectories across the lifespan. A growing body of research indicates that dysfunctional epigenetic regulation contributes to poor cognitive outcomes among aged populations. Here we review…

The study shows that changes in relative verbal vs. figural working memory and fluency performance from one session to a second session two to 3 weeks apart covary with spontaneously occurring changes of cortical asymmetry in the lateral frontal and central cortex, measured by electroencephalography (EEG) in resting conditions before the execution…

An ever increasing amount of research in the fields of developmental psychology and adult cognitive neuroscience explores attentional control as a driver of visual short-term and working memory capacity limits ("VSTM" and "VWM", respectively). However, these literatures have thus far been disparate: they use different measures or different labels,…

Individual differences in psychophysiological function have been shown to influence the balance between flexibility and distractibility during attentional set-shifting [e.g., Dreisbach et al. (2005). Dopamine and cognitive control: The influence of spontaneous eyeblink rate and dopamine gene polymorphisms on perseveration and distractibility.…

A quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis combined data from 354 participants across 22 fMRI studies and one positron emission tomography (PET) study to identify the differences in neural correlates of figurative and literal language processing, and to investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in figurative language processing.…

This study investigated links between working memory and speech processing systems. We used delayed pseudoword repetition in fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of sublexical structure in phonological working memory (pWM). We orthogonally varied the number of syllables and consonant clusters in auditory pseudowords and measured the neural…

fMRI was used to explore age differences in the neural substrate of dual-task processing. Brain activations when there was a 100 ms SOA between tasks, and task overlap was high, were contrasted with activations when there was a 1000 ms SOA, and first task processing was largely complete before the second task began. Younger adults (M = 21 yrs)…

The cognitive process of imaging an object turning around is called mental rotation. Many studies have been put forward analyzing mental rotation by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured during mental rotation of characters in a sample (N = 82) with a sufficient size to obtain even small effects. A…

We here report two studies exploring associations between inhibitory control (measured with the Sustained Attention to Response Task, SART) on the one hand, and self-reports of trait cooperativeness and empathy on the other. A coherent picture was obtained in women whose inhibitory control proficiency predicted higher scores on the Temperament and…

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have revealed that faces and words show a robust difference in the lateralization of their N170. The present study investigated the development of this differential lateralization in school-age boys. We assessed the potential role of fetal testosterone (FT) level as a factor biasing the prenatal…

Quality of mothering relies on the integrity of multiple physiological and behavioral systems and on two maternal factors, one proximal and one distal, that have a great impact on how a mother mothers: postpartum depression and early experiences. To mother appropriately requires the action of systems that regulate sensation, perception, affect,…