Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

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…

Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

Working memory training improves children's cognitive performance on untrained tasks; however, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. This was investigated in 32 typically developing children aged 10-14 years (19 girls and 13 boys) using a randomized controlled design and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (Devon, UK;…

New brain imaging methods are helping us better understand how children learn, writes neuroscientist John Gabrieli. But "education neuroscience" has become the source of both promise and debate.

There is no relationship more vital than the one a child shares with their primary caregivers early in development. Yet many children worldwide are raised in settings that lack the warmth, connection, and stimulation provided by a responsive primary caregiver. In this study, we used data from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), a…

Interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are fundamental to human emotion. Despite the central role of frontoamygdala communication in adult emotional learning and regulation, little is known about how top-down control emerges during human development. In the present cross-sectional pilot study, we experimentally manipulated…

Social cognition is a set of complex processes that mediate much of human behavior. The development of these skills is related to and interdependent on other cognitive processes, particularly inhibitory control. Brain regions associated with inhibitory control and social cognition overlap functionally and structurally, especially with respect to…

This study examined how timing (i.e., relative maturity) and rate (i.e., how quickly infants attain proficiency) of A-not-B performance were related to changes in brain activity from age 6 to 12 months. A-not-B performance and resting EEG (electroencephalography) were measured monthly from age 6 to 12 months in 28 infants and were modeled using…

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the…

Exposure to early psychosocial deprivation as a result of institutional care disrupts typical brain development. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) is the first longitudinal study to investigate the neurodevelopment of institutionalized infants randomized to a foster care (FCG) intervention versus care as usual (CAUG). Here, we…

The emergence of visual cortex specialization for culturally acquired characters like letters and digits, both arbitrary shapes related to specific cognitive domains, is yet unclear. Here, 20 young children (6.12 years old) were tested with a frequency-tagging paradigm coupled with electroencephalogram recordings to assess discrimination responses…

Sleep spindles are related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities. However, they undergo drastic maturational changes during adolescence. Here we used a longitudinal approach (across 7 years) to explore whether developmental changes in sleep spindle density can explain individual differences in sleep-dependent…

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…