Brain drain has long been argued to be one of Africa's key development challenges. This paper provides a more nuanced analysis of African career mobility through a focus on professionals in the creative industries, specifically Ghanaian fashion designers. Drawing on interviews with 31 fashion designers but focussing on the career geography of…

Purpose: We explore a new approach to the study of cognitive effort involved in listening to speech by measuring the brain activity in a listener in relation to the brain activity in a speaker. We hypothesize that the strength of this brain-to-brain synchrony (coupling) reflects the magnitude of cognitive effort involved in verbal communication…

Despite the recognized importance of addressing belief bias in critical thinking, little is known about the neural activity underlying belief-bias reasoning and its connection to critical thinking. The study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural responses during belief-bias reasoning and explored the extent to which these…

Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

In this study, we aimed to find biomarkers of autism in young children. We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) in thirty children (4-7 years) with autism and thirty age, gender-matched controls while they were watching cartoons. We focused on characterizing neural oscillations by amplitude (power spectral density, PSD) and phase (preferred phase…

Background: Technologies such as videofluoroscopy, therapy applications, and telehealth have been translated into the clinical toolkit of many speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an emerging technology that shows therapeutic promise for communication and swallowing disorders and, once suitable for…

Previous research suggests that book reading and screen time have contrasting effects on language and brain development. However, few studies have explicitly investigated whether children's brains function differently during these two activities. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain response in 28…

Scarce clinical trials involving autistic people with intellectual disability (ID) and minimally speaking (MS) status have been a substantial unmet research need in the field. Although earlier studies have demonstrated the feasibility and beneficial potentials of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal…

Awake brain surgery allows for maximal tumor resection, while minimizing postoperative deficits, even when the tumor is located within eloquent brain regions. In the current study, we present the case of a patient who underwent awake craniotomy to remove a space-occupying lesion located at the left (dominant) temporal lobe. During subcortical…

This study used event-related potential (ERP) and retrieval practice effect paradigm to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the retrieval practice effect in a third language (L3) vocabulary learning. Thirty-five Chinese (First Language, L1)-English (Second Language, L2) bilinguals without prior knowledge of French (L3) studied 120…

When we memorize multiple words simultaneously, semantic relatedness among those words assists memory. For example, the information about "apple", "banana," and "orange" will be connected via a common concept of "fruits" and become easy to retain and recall. Neural mechanisms underlying this semantic…

Prior work suggests that differences in brain morphology and task-evoked neural activity may underlie extraordinary creative achievement. Here, we extend these findings by focusing on resting blood oxygen level-dependent (rsBOLD) functional connectivity differences between eminent creators from diverse fields of expertise and a "smart"…

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research,…

Neural and behavioral evidence has indicated that video games and mental training can enhance motor skills and attentional stability. The purpose of this study is to investigate the acute effect of a single session of cognitive game training on electroencephalography (EEG) activity and golf putting performance (10, 12 ft putts). A total of twelve…

This study uses CiteSpace, a bibliometric and visualization-analysis tool, to present a systematic analysis of literature in the Web of Science database on physiological-synchrony evoked by attentional engagement. It reviews the publication timeframe, authorship, keywords, and leading institutions and regions, along with burst terms and highly…