Newborns are able to neurally discriminate between speech and nonspeech right after birth. To date it remains unknown whether this early speech discrimination and the underlying neural language network is associated with later language development. Preterm-born children are an interesting cohort to investigate this relationship, as previous…

Functional connectivity within and between Intrinsic Connectivity Networks (ICNs) transforms over development and is thought to support high order cognitive functions. But how variable is this process, and does it diverge with altered cognitive development? We investigated age-related changes in integration and segregation within and between ICNs…

Visual working memory (VWM) is reliably predictive of fluid intelligence and academic achievements. The objective of the current study was to investigate individual differences in pre-schoolers' VWM processing by examining the association between behaviour, brain function and parent-reported measures related to the child's environment. We used a…

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…

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition (Swingley, "Philos Trans R Soc Lond. Series B, Biol Sci" 364(1536), 3617-3632, 2009). By the middle of the first year, infants seem to have…

Working memory (WM) skills are closely associated with learning progress in key areas such as reading and mathematics across childhood. As yet, however, little is known about how the brain systems underpinning WM develop over this critical developmental period. The current study investigated whether and how structural brain correlates of…

The present study explored the origins of word learning in early infancy. Using event-related potentials (ERP) we monitored the brain activity of 3-month-old infants when they were repeatedly exposed to several initially novel words paired consistently with each the same initially novel objects or inconsistently with different objects. Our results…

Working memory (WM) capacity reflects executive functions associated with performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks and education outcomes, including mathematics achievement, and is associated with dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal cortices. Here we asked if family income is associated with variation in the functional brain organization of…

Mathematical disabilities (MD) have a negative life-long impact on professional success, employment, and health outcomes. Yet little is known about the intrinsic functional brain organization that contributes to poor math skills in affected children. It is now increasingly recognized that math cognition requires coordinated interaction within a…

Functional connectivity is the statistical association of neuronal activity time courses across distinct brain regions, supporting specific cognitive processes. This coordination of activity is likely to be highly important for complex aspects of cognition, such as the communication of fluctuating task goals from higher-order control regions to…

The aim of the present study was to investigate developmental changes in encoding processes between 6-year-old children and adults using event-related potentials (ERPs). Although episodic memory ("EM") effects have been reported in both children and adults at retrieval and subsequent memory effects have been established in adults, no…

Cognitive development and learning are characterized by diminished reliance on effortful procedures and increased use of memory-based problem solving. Here we identify the neural correlates of this strategy shift in 7-9-year-old children at an important developmental period for arithmetic skill acquisition. Univariate and multivariate approaches…

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…

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory…

Here we report evidence from a new eye-tracking measure of relational memory that suggests that 9-month-old infants can encode memories in terms of the relations among items, a function putatively subserved by the hippocampus. Infants learned about the association between faces that were superimposed on unique scenic backgrounds. During test…