Purpose: To examine older adults' perceptions of the link between physical activity (PA) and nutrition to the maintenance of cognitive health. Design and Methods: Forty-two focus groups (FGs) were conducted with 396 ethnically diverse (White, African American, American Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Hispanic) community-dwelling older adults. FGs…

Aim: Subcortical band heterotopia (SBH) or "double cortex" is a malformation of cortical development resulting from impaired neuronal migration. So far, research has focused on the neurological, neuroimaging, and genetic correlates of SBH. More recently, clinical reports and small sample studies have documented neuropsychological dysfunction in…

The conference proceedings of scientists specializing in language processes and neurophysiological mechanisms are reported to stimulate a cross-over of interest and research in the central brain phenomena (reception, understanding, retention, integration, formulation, and expression) as they relate to speech and language. Eighteen research reports…

Background: In a previous study from our lab, adult males with non-syndromic cleft lip and/or palate (NSCLP) were shown to have significantly lower temporal lobe gray matter volume than matched controls. The current study was designed to begin a regional analysis of specific subregions of the temporal lobe. The superior temporal plane (STP) is a…

How the nervous system encodes learning and memory processes has interested researchers for 100 years. Over this span of time, a number of basic neuroscience methods has been developed to explore the relationship between learning and the brain, including brain lesion, stimulation, pharmacology, anatomy, imaging, and recording techniques. In this…

Recent news articles and studies have generated concern among New England policy makers and others that the region's supply of young, highly educated professionals is disappearing. The fear is that comparatively high housing and other costs may be driving away many within this highly mobile group. This paper explores trends in the stocks and…

It is not known why people move their eyes when engaged in non-visual cognition. The current study tested the hypothesis that differences in saccadic eye movement rate (EMR) during non-visual cognitive tasks reflect different requirements for searching long-term memory. Participants performed non-visual tasks requiring relatively low or high…

Infants younger than 20 months of age interpret both words and symbolic gestures as object names. Later in development words and gestures take on divergent communicative functions. Here, we examined patterns of brain activity to words and gestures in typically developing infants at 18 and 26 months of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were…

Purpose: To examine the behavioral effects and neural activation patterns associated with implicit semantic processing influences on phonological judgments during reading in children and adults. Method: Whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were obtained from 2 groups, children (9-13 years) and adults, performing a homophone judgment…

Daniel Offer's seminal writings in the 1960s led to a realization that normal adolescence was not characterized by turmoil and upheaval, the then prevailing view that derived from studies of clinical samples. In this paper, the research findings that have appeared over the last four decades are reviewed with respect to the overall features of…

There is debate as to the relationship between mathematical ability and language. Some research has suggested that common processes underlie arithmetic and grammar while other research has suggested that these are distinct processes. The current study aimed to address this issue in a large group of 68 left hemisphere stroke patients who were all…

The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental trajectory of error monitoring. For this purpose, children (age 7-8), young adolescents (age 13-14) and adults (age 23-24) performed a Go/No-Go task and were compared on overt reaction time (RT) performance and on event-related potentials (ERPs), thought to reflect error detection…

Attractiveness is a facial attribute that shapes human affiliative behaviours. In a previous study we reported a linear response to facial attractiveness in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region involved in reward processing. There are strong theoretical grounds for the hypothesis that coding stimulus reward value also involves the amygdala. The…

Past autism research has often been dedicated to tracing the causes of the disorder to a localized neurological abnormality, a single functional network, or a single cognitive-behavioral domain. In this review, I argue that autism is a "distributed disorder" on various levels of study (genetic, neuroanatomical, neurofunctional, behavioral).…

Relative to other ages, adolescence is described as a period of increased impulsive and risk-taking behavior that can lead to fatal outcomes (suicide, substance abuse, HIV, accidents, etc.). This study was designed to examine neural correlates of risk-taking behavior in adolescents, relative to children and adults, in order to predict who may be…