Understanding brain development and its relationship to intelligence promotes a clearer understanding of giftedness. Children are born with unique patterns and pathways which provide potential for high levels of intelligence. Parents and teachers contribute to the development of giftedness with experiences that are appropriately stimulating. It is…

We investigated whether or not there is a relationship between hand preference for grasping and hemispheric dominance for language--and how each of these is related to other traditional measures of handedness. To do this we asked right- and left-handed participants to put together two different sets of 3D puzzles made out of big or very small…

Selectively retrieving a target memory among related memories requires some degree of inhibitory control over interfering and competing memories, a process assumed to be supported by inhibitory mechanisms. Evidence from behavioral studies suggests that such inhibitory control can lead to subsequent forgetting of the interfering information, a…

Steven F. Maier, winner of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, is cited for his work in the fields of learned helplessness; cytokines, depressed mood, and cognitive interference; and the brain structures that produce and counteract learned helplessness. In addition to the citation, a biography and selected bibliography of Maier's…

Memory impairments are common after stroke, and the anatomical basis for impairments may be quite variable. To determine the range of stroke-related memory impairment, we identified all case reports and group studies through the Medline database and the Science Citation Index. There is no hypothesis about memory that is unique to stroke, but there…

Multi-voxel pattern analyses have proved successful in "decoding" mental states from fMRI data, but have not been used to examine brain differences associated with atypical populations. We investigated a group of 16 (14 males) high-functioning participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 16 non-autistic control participants (12 males)…

Previous repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and neuroimaging studies showed that Broca's area is involved in the interaction between gestures and words. However, in these studies the nature of this interaction was not fully investigated; consequently, we addressed this issue in three behavioral experiments. When compared to the…

Much of our human mental life looks to involve a seamless unfolding of perception, action and experience: a golden braid in which each element twines intimately with the rest. We see the very world we act in and we act in the world we see. But more than this, visual experience presents us with the world in a way apt for the control and fine…

Functional neuroimaging has been used to study a wide array of psychological traits, including aspects of personality and intelligence. Progress in identifying the neural correlates of individual differences in such traits, for the sake of basic science, has moved us closer to the applied science goal of measuring them and thereby raised ethical…

The relationship between attention and awareness is complex, because both concepts can be understood in different ways. Here we review our recent series of experiments which have tracked the independent contributions of different types of visual attention and awareness to electrophysiological brain responses, and then we report a new experiment…

Reconsolidation has been described as a process where a consolidated memory returns to a labile state when retrieved. Growing evidence suggests that reconsolidation is, in fact, a destabilization/stabilization process that incorporates updated information to a previously consolidated memory. We used the conditioned taste aversion (CTA) task in…

Neuroscience has the potential to make some very exciting contributions to education and pedagogy. However, it is important to ask whether the insights from neuroscience studies can provide "usable knowledge" for educators. With respect to literacy, for example, current neuroimaging methods allow us to ask research questions about how the brain…

For decades neurophysiology has successfully contributed to research and clinical care in child psychiatry. Recently, methodological progress has led to a revival of interest in brain oscillations (i.e., a band of periodic neuronal frequencies with a wave-duration from milliseconds to several seconds which may code and decode information). These…

Recent research suggests that emotion effects in word processing resemble those in other stimulus domains such as pictures or faces. The present study aims to provide more direct evidence for this notion by comparing emotion effects in word and face processing in a within-subject design. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as…

This article argues that one dominant position in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy about how genetic disorders point to the innate specification of dissociated modules in the human brain should be replaced by a dynamic, neuroconstructivist approach in which genes, brain, cognition, and environment interact multidirectionally.…