In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…

Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have…

Recent research shows that deaf signers show increased behavioral and neural sensitivity to certain types of movement, such as biological motion, human actions, and signing avatars. However, other work suggests that in deaf signers exposed to signed language before age five, the mirror mechanism has minimal involvement during the perception of…

Confusion may benefit learning when it is resolved or partially resolved. Metacognitive strategies (MS) may help learners to resolve confusion when it occurs during learning and problem solving. This study examined the relationship between confusion and MS that students evoked in Betty's Brain, a computer-based learning-by-modelling environment…

Research suggests that speech-accompanying gestures influence cognitive processes, but it is not clear whether the gestural benefit is specific to the gesturing hand. Two experiments tested the "(right/left) hand-specificity" hypothesis for self-oriented functions of gestures: gestures with a particular hand enhance cognitive processes…

This qualitative study explored the college life phenomenon as experienced by students with mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). Previous research about such students has focused on topics including study strategy use, access of support services, and insights from caregivers or instructors. However, little attention has been paid to the perceptions…

The paper presents a discussion of human mental processes as they relate to learning disabilities. Pathognomonic symptoms associated with disturbances to brain areas or functional systems are discussed, as well as treatment procedures. This brain behavior relationship is offered as a basis for a classification system that is seen to more clearly…