Enrichment in rodents affects brain structure, improves behavioral performance, and is neuroprotective. Similarly, in humans, according to the cognitive reserve concept, enriched experience is functionally protective against neuropathology. Despite this parallel, the ability to translate rodent studies to human clinical situations is limited. This…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show atypical processing of facial expressions. Research with autistic toddlers suggests that abnormalities in processing of spatial frequencies (SFs) contribute to such differences. The current event-related-potential (ERP) study investigated differences between 10-month-old infants with high- and…

Infants' perception of faces becomes attuned to the environment during the first year of life. However, the mechanisms that underpin perceptual narrowing for faces are only poorly understood. Considering the developmental similarities seen in perceptual narrowing for faces and speech and the role that statistical learning has been shown to play…

Younger brains are noisier information processing systems; this means that information for younger individuals has to allow clearer differentiation between those aspects that are required for the processing task in hand (the "signal") and those that are not (the "noise"). We compared toddler-directed and adult-directed TV…

The human visual system is able to efficiently extract symmetry information from the visual environment. Prior neuroimaging evidence has revealed symmetry-preferring neuronal representations in the dorsolateral extrastriate visual cortex; the objective of the present study was to investigate the necessity of these representations in symmetry…

The effects of individual versus category training, using behavioral indices of stimulus discrimination and neural ERPs indices of holistic processing, were examined in infants. Following pretraining assessments at 6 months, infants were sent home with training books of objects for 3 months. One group of infants was trained with six different…

It has been recently argued that some machine learning techniques known as Kernel methods could be relevant for capturing cognitive and neural mechanisms (Jakel, Scholkopf, & Wichmann, 2009). We point out that "String kernels," initially designed for protein function prediction and spam detection, are virtually identical to one contending proposal…

Multisensory integration of spatial information occurs late in childhood, at around eight years (Gori, Del Viva, Sandini, & Burr, 2008). For younger children, the haptic system dominates size discrimination and vision dominates orientation discrimination: the dominance may reflect "sensory calibration," and could have direct consequences on…

This study investigated the ability of preterm infants to learn an object shape with one hand and discriminate a new shape in the opposite hand (without visual control). Twenty-four preterm infants between 33 and 34 + 6 gestational weeks received a tactile habituation task with either their right or left hand followed by a tactile discrimination…

We employ a linear mixed-effects model to estimate the effects of visual form and the linguistic properties of Chinese characters on M100 and M170 MEG responses from single-trial data of Chinese and English speakers in a Chinese lexical decision task. Cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation is used to compute the activation of M100 and M170…

The debate regarding the role of ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOTC) in visual word recognition arises, in part, from difficulty delineating the functional contributions of vOTC as separate from other areas of the reading network. Here, we investigated the feasibility of using TMS to interfere with vOTC processing in order to explore its…

The current authors reply to a response by Bowers on a comment by the current authors on the original article. A typical problem in any discussion about grandmother cells is that there is not a general consensus about what should be called as such. Here, we discuss possible interpretations in turn and contrast them with what we find in our own…

The author briefly responds to a number of terminological, theoretical, and empirical issues raised in some postscripts. The goal is not to respond to each outstanding point but rather to address some comments that in his view confuse rather than clarify matters. He responds to Plaut and McClelland and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman in turn.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (n=13) were presented with mirrored and normal letters at different orientations and were asked to make mirror-normal letter discriminations. As it has been suggested that a mental rotation out of the plane might be necessary to decide on mirrored letters, we wanted to…

Plaut and McClelland (2010) and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman both challenged my characterization of localist and distributed representations. They also challenged the biological plausibility of grandmother cells on conceptual and empirical grounds. This reply addresses these issues in turn. The premise of my argument is that grandmother cells in…