Examines migration patterns into, out of, and within Appalachia during the periods 1975-80 and 1985-90. Focuses on the elderly, working-age adults, the school-age population, college students, college graduates, African Americans, Hispanics, and occupational and economic status groups. Notes significant differences between northern, central, and…

Maintains that one future direction for cognitive development research involves a closer integration with knowledge about the developing brain. Presents a framework for analyzing and interpreting postnatal functional brain development. Discusses three contributing hypotheses, within which a variety of phenomena associated with the neural basis of…

Notes that scientists understand in greater detail the various anatomical and neurological changes that allow children to develop motor and sensory abilities. Explores how the research findings are calling into question the notion of prescribed developmental milestones. (HTH)

Examined whether the atypical pattern of brain activity found in infants of depressed mothers generalized to situations not involving the mother. Found that 13- to 15-month-olds of depressed mothers exhibited reduced left--relative to right--frontal activity during baseline and during interactions with mother and familiar experimenter. This…

Discusses contemporary psychologists' criticism of Jean Piaget's developmental theory; reviews research in brain science, psychology, history, and the experiences of teachers; proposes a new theory of developmental stages based on children's shifting interests; discuses implications of "shifting interest center theory" for school…

Discusses the connection between brain development and human educational needs based on neuroscience research. Considers brain development from conception, including cell structure, myelination, and regional development of the brain, stressing the importance of a child's early environment and the prenatal vulnerability of the brain. (JPB)

Converging evidence from a number of neuroimaging studies suggest that fluent word identification in reading is related to the functional integrity of two left hemisphere posterior systems: a temporo-parietal system and a ventral occipito-temporal system. Readers with difficulties demonstrate heightened reliance on both inferior frontal and right…

This study examined the co-occurrence of both verbal and nonverbal deficits in adults with developmental language disorder (DLD). Comparison with adults without DLD revealed replicable differences between groups on both verbal and nonverbal tasks. Also, an association was found between performance on tests sensitive to facial affect and spatial…

Ingenious and seemingly powerful technologies have been developed recently that enable the visualization in some detail of events in the brain concomitant upon the ongoing behavioral performance of a human participant. Measurement of such brain events offers at the very least a new set of dependent variables in relation to which the independent…

Visual object processing in infancy is often described as proceeding from an early stage in which object features are processed independently to a later stage in which relations between features are taken into account (e.g., Cohen, 1998). Here we present the Representational Acuity Hypothesis, which argues that this behavioral shift can be…

A lateralized backward masking paradigm was used to examine hemisphere differences in orthographic and phonological processes at an early time course of word recognition. Targets (e.g., bowl) were presented and backward masked by either pseudohomophones of the target word (orthographically and phonologically similar, e.g., BOAL), orthographically…

Research indicates that attentional deficits exist in aphasic individuals. However, relatively little is known about auditory vigilance performance in individuals with aphasia. The current study explores reaction time (RT) and accuracy in 10 aphasic participants and 10 nonbrain-damaged controls during linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory…

This study asked whether aphasic adults show different noun/verb retrieval patterns based upon their clinical categorization as fluent or nonfluent. Participants selected either the noun or the verb meaning of target words, as presented in three contexts. The framework was that nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) are processed, stored,…

We applied SMR/theta neurofeedback (NF) training at central sites of 20 Israeli children aged 10-12 years, half boys and half girls. Half of the subjects received C3 training and the other half C4 training, consisting of 20 half-hour sessions. We assessed the effects of training on lateralized lexical decision in Hebrew. The lateralized lexical…

The study investigated gender differences in resting EEG (in three individually determined narrow [alpha] frequency bands) related to the level of general and emotional intelligence. Brain activity of males decreased with the level of general intelligence, whereas an opposite pattern of brain activity was observed in females. This difference was…