Child maltreatment appears to be the single most preventable cause of mental illness and behavioral dysfunction in the United States. Few published studies examine the developmental and the psychobiological consequences of sexual abuse. There are multiple mechanisms through which sexual abuse can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, activate…

Background: Developing control of attention helps infants to regulate their emotions, and individual differences in attention skills may shape how infants perceive and respond to their socio-emotional environments. This study examined whether the temperamental dimensions of self-regulation and negative emotionality relate to infants' attention…

In this article, we report the results of a study on the relationship between individual differences in language learning aptitude and the structural connectivity of language pathways in the adult brain, the first of its kind. We measured four components of language aptitude ("vocabulary learning"; "sound recognition"; "sound-symbol…

This study of infant declarative memory concurrently examined brain-electrical activity and deferred imitation performance in 10-month-old infants. Continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) measures were collected throughout the activity-matched baseline, encoding (modeling) and retrieval (delayed test) phases of a within-subjects deferred imitation…

After acquisition, memories associated with contextual fear conditioning pass through a labile phase, in which they are vulnerable to hippocampal lesions, to a more stable state, via consolidation, in which they engage extrahippocampal structures and are resistant to such disruption. The process is accompanied by changes in the form of the memory…

Attentional selection of a target presented among distractors can be indexed with an event-related potential (ERP) component known as the N2pc. Theoretical interpretation of the N2pc has suggested that it reflects a fundamental mechanism of attention that shelters the cortical representation of targets by suppressing neural activity stemming from…

We examined age-related changes in the interactions among brain regions in children performing rhyming judgments on visually presented words. The difficulty of the task was manipulated by including a conflict between task-relevant (phonological) information and task-irrelevant (orthographic) information. The conflicting conditions included pairs…

Conditional reasoning studies typically involve presenting a major conditional premise ("If P then Q"), a minor premise (P) and a conclusion (Q). We describe how most fMRI studies investigate reasoning and point out that these studies neglect to take into consideration the temporal sequence of cognitive steps generated by the interaction of the…

Limits to the capacity of visual short-term memory (VSTM) indicate a maximum storage of only 3 or 4 items. Recently, it has been suggested that activity in a specific part of the brain, the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), is correlated with behavioral estimates of VSTM capacity and might reflect a capacity-limited store. In three experiments that…

Up to now functional hemispheric asymmetries for global/local processing have mainly been investigated with hierarchical letters as stimuli. In the present study, three experiments were conducted to examine whether corresponding visual-field (VF) effects can also be obtained with more naturalistic stimuli. To this end, images of animals with a…

A right-neglect patient with focal left-hemisphere damage to the posterior superior parietal lobe was assessed for numerical knowledge and tested on the bisection of numerical intervals and visual lines. The semantic and verbal knowledge of numbers was preserved, whereas the performance in numerical tasks that strongly emphasize the visuo-spatial…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (n=13) were presented with mirrored and normal letters at different orientations and were asked to make mirror-normal letter discriminations. As it has been suggested that a mental rotation out of the plane might be necessary to decide on mirrored letters, we wanted to…

The neural efficiency hypothesis of intelligence suggests a more efficient use of the cortex (or even the brain) in brighter as compared to less intelligent individuals. This has been shown in a series of studies employing different neurophysiological measurement methods and a broad range of different cognitive task demands. However, most of the…

Perceived order of two consecutive stimuli may not correspond to the order of their physical onsets. Such a disagreement presumably results from a difference in the speed of stimulus processing toward central decision mechanisms. Since previous evidence suggests that the right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays a role in modulating the…

Human communicational interaction can be mediated by a host of expressive means from words in a natural language to gestures and material symbols. Given the proper contextual setting even an everyday object can gain a mediating function in a communicational situation. In this study we used event-related fMRI to study the brain activity caused by…