Face processing has been studied and discussed in depth during previous decades in several branches of science, and evidence from research supports the view that this process is a highly specialized brain function. Several authors argue that difficulties in the use and comprehension of the information conveyed by human faces could represent a core…

An individual's neurodevelopmental and cognitive sequelae to negative early experiences may, in part, be explained by genetic susceptibility. We examined whether extreme differences in the early caregiving environment, defined as exposure to severe psychosocial deprivation associated with institutional care compared to normative rearing,…

The unrealised and under-estimated value of human motion in human development, functioning and learning is the central cause for its devaluation in Australian society. This paper provides a greater insight into why human motion has high value and should be utilised more in advocacy and implementation in health and education, particularly school…

It is well supported by behavioral and neuroimaging studies that typical language function is lateralized to the left hemisphere in the adult brain and this laterality is less well defined in children. The behavioral literature suggests there maybe be sex differences in language development, but this has not been examined systematically with…

The neural mechanisms underlying the attainment of fear memory accuracy for appropriate discriminative responses to aversive and nonaversive stimuli are unclear. Considerable evidence indicates that coactivator of transcription and histone acetyltransferase cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) binding protein (CBP) is critically required…

Dual-process models suggest that recognition memory is independently supported by recollection and familiarity. Current theories attribute recollection solely to hippocampally mediated episodic memory (EM), and familiarity to both episodic and semantic memory (SM) supported by medial temporal lobe cortex (MTLC) and prefrontal cortex. We tested…

Anatomical and functional brain studies have converged to the hypothesis that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with atypical connectivity. Using a modified resting-state paradigm to drive subjects' attention, we provide evidence of a very marked interaction between ASD brain functional connectivity and cognitive state. We show that…

We used repetition blindness to investigate the nature of the representations underlying identification of manipulable objects. Observers named objects presented in rapid serial visual presentation streams containing either manipulable or nonmanipulable objects. In half the streams, 1 object was repeated. Overall accuracy was lower when streams…

Brain injury that results in an initial behavioural deficit is frequently followed by spontaneous recovery. The intrinsic mechanism of this functional recovery has never been fully understood. Here, we show that reorganization of the corticospinal tract induced by target-derived brain-derived neurotrophic factor is crucial for spontaneous recovery…

Speech recognition is an active process that involves some form of predictive coding. This statement is relatively uncontroversial. What is less clear is the source of the prediction. The dual-stream model of speech processing suggests that there are two possible sources of predictive coding in speech perception: the motor speech system and the…

Recent functional imaging studies link reward-related activation of the midbrain substantia nigra-ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), the site of origin of ascending dopaminergic projections, with improved long-term episodic memory. Here, we investigated in two behavioral experiments how (1) the contingency between item properties and reward, (2) the…

Predicting the near future is important for survival and plays a central role in theories of perception, language processing, and learning. Prediction failures may be particularly important for initiating the updating of perceptual and memory systems and, thus, for the subjective experience of events. Here, we asked observers to make predictions…

A previous study has shown that actively pursuing a moving target provides a predictive motor advantage when compared with passive observation of the moving target while keeping the eyes still [Burke, M. R., & Barnes, G. R. Anticipatory eye movements evoked after active following versus passive observation of a predictable motion stimulus. "Brain…

The current study examined the neural systems underlying lexically conditioned phonetic variation in spoken word production. Participants were asked to read aloud singly presented words, which either had a voiced minimal pair (MP) neighbor (e.g., cape) or lacked a minimal pair (NMP) neighbor (e.g., cake). The voiced neighbor never appeared in the…

Several recent behavioral studies have shown that the enumeration of a small number of items (a process termed "subitizing") depends on the availability of attentional resources and is not a preattentive process as previously thought. Here we studied the neural correlates of visual enumeration under different attentional loads in a dual-task…