Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…

Most existing models of dopamine and learning in Parkinson disease (PD) focus on simulating the role of basal ganglia dopamine in reinforcement learning. Much data argue, however, for a critical role for prefrontal cortex (PFC) dopamine in stimulus selection in attentional learning. Here, we present a new computational model that simulates…

Attention and working memory are fundamental for selecting and maintaining behaviorally relevant information. Not only do both processes closely intertwine at the cognitive level, but they implicate similar functional brain circuitries, namely the frontoparietal and the frontostriatal networks, which are innervated by cholinergic and dopaminergic…

Previous volumetric developmental MRI studies of the brain have shown white matter development continuing through adolescence and into adulthood. This review presents current findings regarding white matter development and organization from diffusion MRI studies. The general trend during adolescence (age 12-18 years) is towards increasing…

Thanks to imaging technology used in neurobiology, people have access to useful and critical information regarding the development of the human brain. This information allows them to become much more effective in helping children in their early development. In fact, when people base their practices on the findings from medical science research,…

Instead of assessing activation in distinct brain regions, approaches to investigating the networks underlying distinct brain functions have come into the focus of neuroscience research. Here, we provide a completely data-driven framework for assessing functional and causal connectivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data,…

Developing "Thinking and Understanding in Young Children" presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary theory and research about young children's developing thinking and understanding. Throughout this second edition, the ideas and theories presented are enlivened by transcripts of children's activities and conversations taken…

TS school starters had enhanced receptive and expressive language on standardised assessment (CELF-P) and enhanced rhyme judgements, spoonerisms, and lexical decision, indicating enhanced phonological skills and word representations. There was marginal but consistent advantage across lexico-semantic tasks. On executive tasks, speeded naming of…

Relationships between the home environment and early developmental outcomes were examined in 166 children born very preterm in one tertiary maternity hospital to explore whether a more optimal home environment could promote resilience. In particular, we explored whether this effect was apparent over and above social risk and children's biological…

The regulation of affective arousal is a critical aspect of children's social and cognitive development. However, few studies have examined the brain mechanisms involved in the development of this aspect of "hot" executive functioning. This process has been conceptualized as involving prefrontal control of the amygdala. Here, using functional…

The aim of this study was to investigate the cognitive and clinical evolution of post-acute stroke patients and the evolution of each Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) item. A longitudinal study was conducted with 42 poststroke individuals in rehabilitation. The MMSE and the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale were used to assess…

In a task where participants' overt task was to track the location of an object across a sequence of events, reaction times to unpredictable probes requiring an inference about a social agent's beliefs about the location of that object were obtained. Reaction times to false belief situations were faster than responses about the (false) contents of…

The relation between the maturation of brain mechanisms responsible for the N400 elicitation in the event-related brain potential (ERP) and the development of behavioral language skills was investigated in 12-month-old infants. ERPs to words presented in a picture-word priming paradigm were analyzed according to the infants' production and…

Does plasticity contribute to adult cognitive development, and if so, in what ways? The vague and overused concept of plasticity makes these controversial questions difficult to answer. In this article, we refine the notion of adult cognitive plasticity and sharpen its conceptual distinctiveness. According to our framework, adult cognitive…

A core aspect of working memory (WM) is the capacity to maintain goal-relevant information in mind, but little is known about how this capacity develops in the human brain. We compared brain activation, via fMRI, between children (ages 7-12 years) and adults (ages 20-29 years) performing tests of verbal and spatial WM with varying amounts (loads)…