Worldwide, approximately 2 billion people are chronically infected with "Toxoplasma gondii" with largely yet unknown consequences. Patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) similarly as mice with chronic toxoplasmosis have persistent neuroinflammation, hypercytokinemia with hypermetabolism associated with enhanced lipid peroxidation, and…

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and…

Phosphatase and tensin homolog-induced putative kinase 1 gene mutations have been associated with autosomal recessive early-onset Parkinson's disease. To date, no neuropathological reports have been published from patients with Parkinson's disease with both phosphatase and tensin homolog-induced putative kinase 1 gene copies mutated. We analysed…

Research has shown that exercise improves cognitive function and psychological traits that influence behavior (e.g., mood, level of motivation). The evidence in the literature also shows that physical education may enhance learning or that academic performance is at least maintained despite a reduction in classroom time in order to increase time…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

Temporal preparation was assessed in 15 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, 20 persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 28 healthy older adults. Participants completed a simple reaction time task in which the preparatory interval duration varied randomly within two blocks (short versus long temporal window). Results indicated that AD and…

A relationship between fetal heart rate (HR) and cognition is explored within the context of infant, child and adult studies where the association is well established. Lack of direct access to the fetus and maturational changes limit research paradigms and response measures for fetal studies. Nevertheless, neural regulation of HR shows a number of…

Fetal magnetoencephalography (fMEG) is the only non-invasive method for investigating evoked brain responses and spontaneous brain activity generated by the fetus "in utero". Fetal auditory as well as visual-evoked fields have been successfully recorded in basic stimulus-response studies. Moreover, paradigms investigating precursors for cognitive…

A distributed limbic-corticostriatal circuitry is implicated in cue-induced drug craving and relapse. Exposure to drug-paired cues not only precipitates relapse, but also triggers the reactivation and reconsolidation of the cue-drug memory. However, the limbic cortical-striatal circuitry underlying drug memory reconsolidation is unclear. The aim…

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not…

The "language-culture tesseract" hypothesized in the September 2010 issue of "Mind, Brain, and Education" suggests successive links between non-native language (NNL) acquisition, the development of cross-cultural empathy, and prosocial global ethics. Invoking Goethe's (1833/1999) aphorism, "those who do not know other languages know nothing of…

Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and developmental dyslexia in Chinese, revealed that the single most important factor appears to be orthographic processing skills rather than phonological skills. Also some studies have indicated that even in alphabetic languages some dyslexic individuals reveal deficits…

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) often presents with asymmetric atrophy. We assessed whether premorbid occupations in FTLD patients were associated with these hemispheric asymmetries. In a multi-center chart review of 588 patients, occupation information was related to location of tissue loss or dysfunction. Patients with atrophy…

The aims of this study are to compare quantitatively the gait strategy of the right and left hemiplegic children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) using gait analysis. The gait strategy of 28 right hemiparetic CP (RHG) and 23 left hemiparetic CP (LHG) was compared using gait analysis (spatio-temporal and kinematic parameters) and considering the hemiplegic…

The present study investigates the influence of depth on pseudoneglect in healthy young participants (n = 18) within three-dimensional virtual space, by presenting a variation of the greyscales task and a landmark task, which were specifically matched for stimulus-response compatibility, as well as perceptual factors within and across the tasks.…