The association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and childhood antisocial outcomes has been demonstrated repeatedly across a variety of outcomes. Yet debate continues as to whether this association reflects a direct programming effect of nicotine on fetal brain development, or a phenotypic indicator of heritable liability passed from…

Recent brain mapping studies have provided new insights into the cortical systems that mediate human speech perception. Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM) is a brain mapping method that is used clinically to localize cortical functions in neurosurgical patients. Recent ESM studies have yielded new insights into the cortical systems that…

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age-related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6-month-olds because this…

Twin-study research suggests that many (but not all) of the same genes contribute to genetic influence on diverse learning abilities and disabilities, a hypothesis called "generalist genes". This generalist genes hypothesis was tested using a set of 10 DNA markers (single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs]) found to be associated with early reading…

Background: Dementia is common among adults with Down's syndrome (DS); yet the diagnosis of dementia, particularly in its early stage, can be difficult in this population. One possible reason for this may be the different clinical manifestation of dementia among people with intellectual disabilities. Aims: The aim of this study was to map out the…

To date, teacher migration and recruitment have been considered mainly in respect of supply. This article, however, discusses teacher migration and recruitment in terms of demand. England underwent a period of acute teacher shortage during the late 1990s and early 2000s. This prompted the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to sanction the…

Suggesting that neuroscience and the actualities of brain circuitry can provide guidance for what is misunderstood in writing education, namely, the role of subjectivity and values in the composing process, this paper argues that neuroscience provides corporeal evidence for the salience of particular brain structures and processes responsible for…

Few studies have approached second language teaching from a neurolinguistic perspective. An exception is Marcel Danesi's educational construct of neurological bimodality, an attempt to find a neurological foundation for classroom language instruction. The underlying hypothesis is that there is a natural flow of information processing from the…

Reading is fundamental to learning. Vital to learning is memory, which is the mental faculty used to retrieve what was read and understood. The human brain is about the size of a grapefruit and weighs about as much as a head of cabbage. The cerebral cortex is a kind of problem-solving and memorizing device. The hippocampus plays a critically…

The fact that there is an imperfect correlation between the asymmetrical function of the two halves of the brain and handedness has been a source of puzzlement for many investigators. Many theories have been proposed to explain handedness and why handedness does not correlate perfectly with other measures of lateralization. To assess the…

A series of studies has investigated the possibility that human infants performing tasks exhibit something like the P300, a positive-going brain wave associated with task performance and the updating of working memory among adults. Findings indicate that, when infants have the opportunity to form a template against which to compare a previously…

Visual, auditory, and bimodal event-related potentials were recorded from 50 males, and lateral asymmetry indices were derived. Eleven psychometric tests of different cognitive attributes were also administered to them. This area of research has been labeled aptitude-treatment-interaction (ATI). The emphasis of ATI research is on identification of…

This paper examines the theories of Herman T. Epstein, who has suggested that there may be a correlation between Piaget's stages of intellectual development and the brain growth stages. Epstein's research has indicated that the human brain grows in spurts rather than in simple linear increments across time. Of special significance to educators is…

Education in the United States for most of the last 50 years has built its knowledge base on a single dominating foundation--behavioral psychology. This paper analyzes the history of behaviorism. Syntheses are presented of the theories of Ivan P. Pavlov, J. B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner, all of whom contributed to the body of works on behaviorism.…