This study investigates crossmodal fear generalization, testing whether conditioned fear spreads between different sensory modalities. Participants in the unimodal group were presented with visual stimuli--images of a sparrow (CS+) and a laptop (CS-)--while the crossmodal group received auditory stimuli--sparrow calls (CS+) and keyboard typing…

When searching for a known target, mental representations of target features, or templates, guide attention towards matching objects and facilitate recognition. When only distractor features are known, distractor templates allow irrelevant objects to be recognised and attention to be shifted away. This is particularly true in X-ray baggage search,…

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex.…

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…

Humans are born with the ability to mentally represent the approximate numerosity of a set of objects, but little is known about the brain systems that sub-serve this ability early in life and their relation to the brain systems underlying symbolic number and mathematics later in development. Here we investigate processing of numerical magnitudes…

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…

The science of sound helps students learn that sound is energy traveling in waves as vibrations transfer the energy through various media: solids, liquids, and gases. In addition to learning about the physical science of sound, students can learn about the sounds of different animal species: how sounds contribute to animals' survival, and how…

Infants' speech perception abilities change through the first year of life, from broad sensitivity to a wide range of speech contrasts to becoming more finely attuned to their native language. What remains unclear, however, is how this perceptual change relates to brain responses to native language contrasts in terms of the functional…

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…

Background: This preliminary study served as a pilot for an ongoing analysis of spectral power in adults with Down syndrome (DS) using a 151 channel whole head magnetoencephalography (MEG). The present study is the first step for examining and comparing cortical responses during spontaneous and task related activity in DS. Method: Cortical…