Objective: Outcome and family history data differentiate children with severe mood dysregulation (SMD), a syndrome characterized by chronic irritability, from children with "classic" episodic bipolar disorder (BD). Nevertheless, the presence of cognitive inflexibility in SMD and BD highlights the need to delineate neurophysiologic similarities and…

Studies of brain development suggest that the increase in risk taking observed during adolescence may be due to insufficient prefrontal executive function compared to a more rapidly developing subcortical motivation system. We examined executive function as assessed by working memory ability in a community sample of youth (n = 387, ages 10 to 12…

Although P3 event-related potential abnormalities have been found in psychopathic individuals, it is unknown whether successful (uncaught) psychopaths and unsuccessful (caught) psychopaths show similar deficits. In this study, P3 amplitude and latency were assessed from a community sample of 121 male adults using an auditory three-stimulus oddball…

We investigated how articulatory complexity at the phoneme level is manifested neurobiologically in an overt production task. fMRI images were acquired from young Korean-speaking adults as they pronounced bisyllabic pseudowords in which we manipulated phonological complexity defined in terms of vowel duration and instability (viz., COMPLEX:…

Past studies have identified individual differences in infant visual attention based upon peak look duration during initial exposure to a stimulus. Colombo and colleagues found that infants that demonstrate brief visual fixations (i.e., short lookers) during familiarization are more likely to demonstrate evidence of recognition memory during…

With an increasing population living at a high altitude (HA), the impact of HA residence on human cognitive function has raised concerns. We recruited two groups of college students with one group born and grew up at HA until early adulthood and the control group born and grew up at near sea level (SL); the two groups were matched at age, gender…

Effective literacy education in deaf students calls for psycholinguistic research revealing the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying their written language processing. When learning a written language, deaf students are often instructed to sign out printed text. The present fMRI study was intended to reveal the neural substrates associated…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether brain activity related to the presence of stuttering can be identified with rapid functional MRI (fMRI) sequences that involved overt and covert speech processing tasks. The long-term goal is to develop sensitive fMRI approaches with developmentally appropriate tasks to identify deviant speech…

The vast majority of word meanings are learned simply by extracting them from context rather than by rote memorization or explicit instruction. Although this skill is remarkable, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved. In the present study, ERPs were recorded as participants read stories in which pseudowords were presented multiple…

A paradigmatic test of executive control, the n-back task, is known to recruit a widely distributed parietal, frontal, and striatal "executive network," and is thought to require an equally wide array of executive functions. The mapping of functions onto substrates in such a complex task presents a significant challenge to any theoretical…

During speech communication, visual information may interact with the auditory system at various processing stages. Most noteworthy, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) data provided first evidence for early and preattentive phonetic/phonological encoding of the visual data stream--prior to its fusion with auditory phonological features [Hertrich,…

Figure copy is the most common method of visual spatial assessment in dementia evaluations, but performance on this test may be multifactorial. We examined the neuroanatomical substrates of figure copy performance in 46 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 48 patients with the behavioral variant of Frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). A group of…

Background: Physical activity and structural differences in the hippocampus have been linked to educational outcome. We investigated whether a curriculum-based physical activity intervention correlates positively with children's academic achievement, psychological well-being, health-related quality of life (HRQoL), fitness, and structural…

In synesthesia, stimulation of one sensory modality leads to a percept in another nonstimulated modality, for example, graphemes trigger an additional color percept in grapheme-color synesthesia, which encompasses the variants letter-color and digit-color synesthesia. Until recently, it was assumed that synesthesia occurs strictly unidirectional:…

The neural bases of prosody during the production of literal and idiomatic interpretations of literally plausible idioms was investigated. Left- and right-hemisphere-damaged participants and normal controls produced literal and idiomatic versions of idioms ("He hit the books.") All groups modulated duration to distinguish the interpretations. LHD…