The peripheral manifestations of the inherited neuropathies are increasingly well characterized, but their effects upon cranial nerve function are not well understood. Hearing loss is recognized in a minority of children with this condition, but has not previously been systemically studied. A clear understanding of the prevalence and degree of…

The present study attempted to investigate the effect of perceptual-motor training on attention in children with autism spectrum disorders. The participants (20 girls and 20 boys) were divided into experimental and control groups. They were selected from among 85 subjects after primary tests to be matched. The design of the study was…

Participants saw a small number of objects in a visual display and performed a visual detection or visual-discrimination task in the context of task-irrelevant spoken distractors. In each experiment, a visual cue was presented 400 ms after the onset of a spoken word. In experiments 1 and 2, the cue was an isoluminant color change and participants…

During childhood and adolescence, ongoing white matter maturation in the fronto-parietal cortices and connecting fiber tracts is measurable with diffusion-weighted imaging. Important questions remain, however, about the links between these changes and developing cognitive functions. Spatial working memory (SWM) performance improves significantly…

By using the gap overlap task, we investigated disengagement from faces and objects in children (9-17 years old) with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its neurophysiological correlates. In typically developing (TD) children, faces elicited larger gap effect, an index of attentional engagement, and larger saccade-related event-related…

A quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis combined data from 354 participants across 22 fMRI studies and one positron emission tomography (PET) study to identify the differences in neural correlates of figurative and literal language processing, and to investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in figurative language processing.…

Insomnia is prevalent, causing severe distress and impairment. This review focuses on illuminating the puzzling finding that many insomnia patients misperceive their sleep. They overestimate their sleep onset latency (SOL) and underestimate their total sleep time (TST), relative to objective measures. This tendency is ubiquitous (although not…

Here gray and white matter changes after four weeks of videogame practice were analyzed using optimized voxel-based morphometry (VBM), cortical surface and cortical thickness indices, and white matter integrity computed from several projection, commissural, and association tracts relevant to cognition. Beginning with a sample of one hundred young…

Objectives: This study used proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy ([superscript 1]H MRS) to evaluate the in vivo effects of extended-release divalproex sodium on the glutamatergic system in adolescents with bipolar disorder, and to identify baseline neurochemical predictors of clinical remission. Method: Adolescents with bipolar disorder who were…

Monkeys exposed to stress inoculation protocols early in life subsequently exhibit diminished neurobiological responses to moderate psychological stressors and enhanced cognitive control of behavior during juvenile development compared to non-inoculated monkeys. The present experiments extended these findings and revealed that stress inoculated…

Objective: Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have delayed cortical maturation, evidenced by regionally specific slower cortical thinning. However, the relationship between cortical maturation and attention capacities in typically developing children is unknown. This study examines cortical thickness correlates of…

Learning to associate auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is a first and critical step for becoming a skilled reader in alphabetic languages. Nevertheless, it remains largely unknown which brain areas subserve the learning and automation of such associations. Here, we employ functional magnetic resonance…

Recent fMRI and TMS studies on idiom comprehension have shown that the prefrontal cortex is involved in idiom processing. Since schizophrenic patients exhibit prefrontal "structural" changes and dysexecutive "behavioural" deficits, we hypothesised an impairment in idiom comprehension, correlating with performance on executive…

The capacity for long-term changes in synaptic efficacy can be altered by prior synaptic activity, a process known as "metaplasticity." Activation of receptors for modulatory neurotransmitters can trigger downstream signaling cascades that persist beyond initial receptor activation and may thus have metaplastic effects. Because activation of…

"Transitive inference" refers to the ability to judge from memory the relationships between indirectly related items that compose a hierarchically organized series, and this capacity is considered a fundamental feature of relational memory. Here we explored the role of the prefrontal cortex in transitive inference by examining the performance of…