Most neuropsychological assessments of episodic memory bear little similarity to the events that patients actually experience as memories in daily life. The first aim of this study was to use a virtual environment to characterize episodic memory profiles in an ecological fashion, which includes memory for central and perceptual details,…

The present study contrasted physiological arousal in infants and toddlers with fragile X syndrome to typically developing control participants and examined physiological predictors early in development to autism severity later in development in fragile X syndrome. Thirty-one males with fragile X syndrome (ages 8-40 months) and 25 age-matched…

Little of 150 years of research in Cognitive Neurosciences, Human Factors, and the mathematics of Production Management have found their way into educational policy and certainly not into the classroom or in the production of educational materials in any meaningful or practical fashion. Whilst more mundane concepts of timing, sequencing, spatial…

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in…

It is generally assumed that children with intellectual disabilities (ID) have an increased risk of impaired visual information processing due to brain damage or brain development disorder. So far little evidence has been presented to support this assumption. Abnormal visual orienting behavior is a sensitive tool to evaluate impaired visual…

Objective: The current study examined the impact of risperidone and divalproex on affective and working memory circuitry in patients with pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD). Method: This was a six-week, double-blind, randomized trial of risperidone plus placebo versus divalproex plus placebo for patients with mania (n = 21; 13.6 [plus or minus] 2.5…

A single-group pre- and post-test design was used to evaluate functional outcomes of a constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) protocol implemented in an outpatient therapy center. The participants were 29 children with hemiplegia, ages 1.6-19.1 years old. The less-involved upper limb was placed in a cast that was worn 24 hr a day, 7 days a…

This study investigated the impact of a well-defined behavioral dysarthria treatment on acoustic and perceptual measures of speech in four adults with dysarthria secondary to stroke. A single-subject A-B-A experimental design was used to measure the effects of the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT[R]LOUD) on the speech of individual…

Objective: The neurobiological basis of inattentiveness, a core feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is not yet well understood. Structural abnormalities in thalamus, especially the pulvinar nuclei, have recently been reported in ADHD. Pulvinar nuclei maintain reciprocal connections with cortical/subcortical areas, and play…

The study of the neural basis of syntactic processing has greatly benefited from neuroimaging techniques. Research on syntactic processing in bilinguals has used a variety of techniques, including mainly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP). This paper reports on a functional near-infrared spectroscopy…

Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…

Three respondents provide cogent commentary on the author's first article, "Does the Adolescent Brain Make Risk Taking Inevitable? A Skeptical Appraisal." Two respondent papers argue that the author mischaracterized valid and useful developmental and biological arguments affirming adolescents' singular risk propensities; the third…

Language comprehension is a complex process in which multiple, including semantic and syntactic, representations of the material are constructed as the input unfolds. Sometimes more than one way to interpret a sentence or sequence of sentences is possible and reliable sources of information may mislead us into developing an ultimately incorrect…

The goal of this dissertation is to examine how brain regions respond to different types of competition during word comprehension and word production. I will present three studies that attempt to enhance the current understanding of which brain regions are sensitive to different aspects of competition and how the nature of the stimuli and the…

Previous volumetric developmental MRI studies of the brain have shown white matter development continuing through adolescence and into adulthood. This review presents current findings regarding white matter development and organization from diffusion MRI studies. The general trend during adolescence (age 12-18 years) is towards increasing…