Spanking remains common around the world, despite evidence linking corporal punishment to detrimental child outcomes. This study tested whether children (M[subscript age] = 11.60) who were spanked (N = 40) exhibited altered neural function in response to stimuli that suggest the presence of an environmental threat compared to children who were not…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

The hypothesis that brain activity may differ during varied types of video game play was investigated in two studies of event-related potentials exhibited by children age 7 to 12 when processing game-based stimuli requiring correct/incorrect responses or choices between two imaginative alternative responses. The first study had 22 children of…

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

Sensitive responding to others' emotional body expressions is an essential social skill in humans. Using event-related brain potentials, it has recently been shown that the ability to discriminate between emotional body expressions develops between 4 and 8 months of age. However, it is not clear whether the perception of emotional body expressions…

The growth of kids' brain could be optimized by recognizing something. Learning to recognize animals is one of the methods to stimulate the children's brain growth to imagine. Nevertheless, kids tend to spend all their time by playing and could not focus to recognize the animals due to the way of learning which is usually not interactive and not…

In adults, most cognitive and emotional self-regulation is carried out by a network of brain regions, including the anterior cingulate, insula, and areas of the basal ganglia, related to executive attention. We propose that during infancy, control systems depend primarily upon a brain network involved in orienting to sensory events that includes…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine functional anatomy of attention to social (eye gaze) and nonsocial (arrow) communicative stimuli in late childhood and in a disorder defined by atypical processing of social stimuli, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Children responded to a target word ("LEFT"/"RIGHT") in the context of a…

The capacity to engage and communicate in a social world is one of the defining characteristics of the human species. While the network of regions that compose the social brain have been the subject of extensive research in adults, there are limited techniques available for monitoring young infants. This study used near infrared spectroscopy to…

Automatic stimulus-change detection is usually investigated in the auditory modality by studying Mismatch Negativity (MMN). Although the change-detection process occurs in all sensory modalities, little is known about visual deviance detection, particularly regarding the development of this brain function throughout childhood. The aim of the…

It has long been thought that the prefrontal cortex, as the seat of most higher brain functions, is functionally silent during most of infancy. This review highlights recent work concerned with the precise mapping (localization) of brain activation in human infants, providing evidence that prefrontal cortex exhibits functional activation much…

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…

Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…

Everyday experience affords us many opportunities to learn about objects through multiple senses using physical interaction. Previous work has shown that active motor learning of unisensory items enhances memory and leads to the involvement of motor systems during subsequent perception. However, the impact of active motor learning on subsequent…