Leaning Communities at Craven Community College provide unique avenues for student growth. Using quality learning and brain research, we have developed environments that engage students and instructors in continuous improvement, teach academic accountability, and offer students the opportunity to learn and practice employment skills in academic…

The article examines how infants are first permeated by culture. Building on Thibault (2000), semiogenesis is traced to the joint activity of primary intersubjectivity. Using an African example, analysis shows how--at 14 weeks--an infant already uses culturally specific indicators of "what a caregiver wants." Human predispositions and…

Recurring seizures in infants and children are often associated with cognitive deficits, but the reason for the learning difficulties is unclear. Recent studies in several animal models suggest that seizures themselves may contribute in important ways to these deficits. Other studies in animals have shown that recurring seizures result in…

Functional neuroimaging research has shown that certain classes of visual stimulus selectively activate focal regions of visual cortex. Specifically, cortical areas that generally and selectively respond to faces (Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. M. (1997). The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face…

The purpose of the present study was to compare the brain regions and systems that subserve lexical and sublexical processes in reading. In order to do so, three types of tasks were used: (i) silent reading of very high frequency regular words (lexical task); (ii) silent reading of nonwords (sublexical task); and, (iii) silent reading of very low…

The law of intelligence is presented in test independent form. Mental abilities, physical brain size, and infant motor capacity follow the same law of growth from birth to adolescence. Mental growth is independent of race, "SES" or the Flynn effect. The vitality of the mental age scale calls for a reexamination of Wechsler's deviation IQ. This…

Extinction of operantly conditioned responses, which provides a measure of the ability to adapt to changes in the reinforcement value of stimuli, has been linked to orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in human and non-human animals. This article examines the feasibility of using extinction as a measure of the development of OFC function in preschool-age…

The neuropsychological bases of cognitive, social, and moral development are minimally understood, with a seemingly wide chasm between developmental theories and brain maturation models. As one approach to bridging ideas in these areas, we review 10 cases of early prefrontal cortex damage from the clinical literature, highlighting overall clinical…

The research tests the prediction of the inhibitory-interaction hypothesis (Wey, Cook, Landis, Regard, & Graves, 1993) that experience with a task accentuates the functional imbalance between the hemispheres. Right-handed males who were experienced readers were presented a letter string to the centre visual field for lexical decision. The string…

This study describes the linguistic and neuropsychological findings in three right-handed patients with crossed conduction aphasia. Despite the location of the lesion in the right hemisphere, all patients displayed a combination of linguistic deficits typically found in conduction aphasia following analogous damage to the left hemisphere.…

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody.…

It might sound surprising that Motor Neurone Disease (MND), regarded still by many as the very example of a neurodegenerative disease affecting selectively the motor system and sparing the sensory functions as well as cognition, can have a significant influence on language. In this article we hope to demonstrate that language dysfunction is not…

Brain activation during reading of phonographic (Hangul) and ideographic (Hanja) words is compared using functional MRI by taking advantage of the bi-scriptal system of the Korean language. To examine the psycholinguistic difference, i.e., phonographic vs. ideographic, separately from other differences due to Hanja being a secondary script, we…

Objective: Although abnormalities of neural circuits involving the cortex, striatum, and thalamus are hypothesized to underlie Tourette's disorder, the neuronal abnormalities within components of these circuits are unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the cellular neurochemistry within these circuits in Tourette's disorder using…

Axons undergo Wallerian degeneration distal to a point of injury. Experimental investigations have documented many of the cellular and molecular events that underlie this behaviour. Since relatively little is known about such events in human CNS pathologies and current experimental intervention strategies indicate the possibility of significant…