We report a patient (MT) with a highly specific alexia affecting the identification of letters and words but not numbers. He shows a corresponding deficit in writing: his letter writing is impaired while number writing and written calculation is spared. He has no aphasia, no visuo-perceptual or -constructional difficulties, or other cognitive…

Given that there are neural markers for the acquisition of a non-verbal skill, we review evidence of neural markers for the acquisition of vocabulary. Acquiring vocabulary is critical to learning one's native language and to learning other languages. Acquisition requires the ability to link an object concept (meaning) to sound. Is there a region…

The ubiquitous left-hemisphere advantage in visual word processing can be accounted for in different ways. Competing theories have been tested recently using cAsE-aLtErNaTiNg words to investigate boundary conditions for the typical effect. We briefly summarize this research and examine the disagreements and commonalities across the theoretical…

Background: Several studies have documented fronto-striatal dysfunction in children and adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) using response inhibition tasks. Our objective was to examine functional brain abnormalities among youths and adults with ADHD and to examine the relations between these neurobiological…

We describe what may well be the first course devoted explicitly to the topic of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE). In the course, students examine four central topics (literacy, numeracy, emotion/motivation, and conceptual change) through the perspectives of psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and education. We describe the pedagogical tools we…

This report summarizes findings from a study of educators' views on the role of the brain in education. Responses were sought using questionnaires (n= 189), followed by a smaller number of in-depth interviews (n= 11). Results show a high level of enthusiasm for attempts to interrelate neuroscience and education, although conceptualizations about…

Three decades of research into the "chemical imbalance" theory of mental disorders failed to pan out. The biological causes of most mental disorders remain unknown. However, it is now well understood that psychiatric drugs work by perturbing neurotransmitter systems, and that the brain, in response to this blocking of normal function, undergoes a…

Neurogranin (Ng), a PKC substrate, is abundantly expressed in brain regions important for cognitive functions. Deletion of Ng caused severe deficits in spatial learning and LTP in the hippocampal CA1 region of mice. These Ng-/- mice also exhibit deficits in the amplification of their hippocampal signaling pathways critical for learning and memory.…

An object that moves is spotted almost effortlessly; it "pops out." When the observer is stationary, a moving object is uniquely identified by retinal motion. This is not so when the observer is also moving; as the eye travels through space all scene objects change position relative to the eye producing a complicated field of retinal motion.…

This study explored the relations among ritualistic and compulsive-like behavior, fears, and neuropsychological performance in typically developing children between the ages of four and eight years. Forty-two children were administered a battery of neuropsychological tasks assessing response inhibition and set-shifting. Two parent-report…

This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-question-answer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position…

Models of interhemispheric interference have been proposed as an explanation for the cause and maintenance of stuttering. One component of this model is attentional functioning and allocation. This study examined attentional functioning in 19 children who stuttered and 19 children who did not stutter using a standardized, commercially available…

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) refers to the finding that retrieving a memory can impair subsequent recall of related memories. Here, the authors present a new model of how the brain gives rise to RIF in both semantic and episodic memory. The core of the model is a recently developed neural network learning algorithm that leverages regular…

In recent years there has been growing interest across the world in ways of developing children's thinking and learning skills. This interest has been fed by new knowledge about how the brain works and how people learn, and evidence that specific interventions can improve children's thinking and intelligence. Thinking skills are important because…

An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine…