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…

This study examined individual-level variability in N400 and P600 ERP correlates of native and nonnative language sentence processing of semantic and grammar information. Twenty-six native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a second language were tested. Participants completed sentence reading tasks in English and Spanish during EEG…

The potential benefits and mechanistic effects of working memory training (WMT) in children are the subject of much research and debate. We show that after five weeks of school-based, adaptive WMT 6-9 year-old primary school children had greater activity in prefrontal and striatal brain regions, higher task accuracy, and reduced intra-individual…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

In a previous study, we reported the first measurements of pre-movement and sensorimotor cortex activity in preschool age children (ages 3-5 years) using a customized pediatric magnetoencephalographic system. Movement-related activity in the sensorimotor cortex differed from that typically observed in adults, suggesting that maturation of cortical…

Research shows that strong right-handedness is associated with decreased cognitive flexibility and decreased tendencies to update beliefs, arising from decreased interhemispheric interaction. In the current study, strong right-handedness was associated with decreased overall liking of less popular musical genres (with the specific genres of…

The most important information conveyed by language is often contained not in the utterance itself, but in the interaction between the utterance and the comprehender's knowledge of the world and the current situation. This dissertation uses psycholinguistic methods to explore the effects of a common type of inference--causal inference--on language…

Brain imaging studies provide strong evidence for the involvement of the human mirror system during the observation of complex movements, depending on the individual's motor expertise. Here, we ask the question whether motor expertise not only affects perception while observing movements, but also benefits perception while solving mental rotation…

Individual differences in working memory (WM) performance have rarely been related to individual differences in the functional responsivity of the WM brain network. By neglecting person-to-person variation, comparisons of network activity between younger and older adults using functional imaging techniques often confound differences in activity…

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)…

Research indicates that right-hemisphere mechanisms are specifically sensitive to and averse to risk. Research also indicates that mixed degree of handedness is associated with increased access to right hemisphere processing. Accordingly, it was predicted that mixed-handers would exhibit greater risk aversion. Participants were presented with…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate differences in neural information transmission between gifted and normal children involved in scientific hypothesis generation. To investigate changes in the amount of information transmission, the children's averaged-cross mutual information (A-CMI) of EEGs was estimated during their generation…

The purpose of this research was to examine the validity of the 55-item Revised Token Test (RTT) and to compare traditional and Rasch-based scores in their ability to detect group differences and change over time. The 55-item RTT was administered to 108 left- and right-hemisphere stroke survivors, and the data were submitted to Rasch analysis.…

Compares language patterns in two moderately aphasic adults over age 60 with left hemisphere damage, using measures of lexical richness (word frequency). Argues for the usefulness of evaluating patients on conversational speech and the role of extensive linguistic analysis in prognosis and therapy. The discussion considers both qualitative and…