The effect of deep brain stimulation on the two speech-production subsystems, articulation and phonation, of nine Parkinsonian patients is examined. Production parameters (stop closure voicing; stop closure, VOT, vowel) in fast syllable-repetitions were defined and measured and quantitative, objective metrics of vocal fold function were obtained…

Cognitive control of behavior continues to improve through adolescence in parallel with important brain maturational processes including synaptic pruning and myelination, which allow for efficient neuronal computations and the functional integration of widely distributed circuitries supporting top-down control of behavior. This is also a time when…

Auditory word comprehension was assessed in a series of 289 acute left hemisphere stroke patients. Participants decided whether an auditorily presented word matched a picture. On different trials, words were presented with a matching picture, a semantic foil, or a phonemic foil. Participants had significantly more trouble with semantic foils…

Developmental exceptionalities span the range of learning abilities and encompass children with both learning disorders and learning gifts. The purpose of this article is to stimulate thinking about these exceptionalities, particularly the complexities and variations within and across people. Investigators tend to view learning disabilities or…

It has been hypothesised that autism is an extreme version of the male brain, caused by high levels of prenatal testosterone (Baron-Cohen 1999). To test this proposal, associations were assessed between three visuo-spatial tasks and prenatal testosterone, indexed in second-to-fourth digit length ratios (2D:4D). The study included children with…

The relative advantage of the left (LH) over the right hemisphere (RH) in processing of verbal material for most individuals is well established. Nevertheless, several studies have reported the ability of positively and negatively valenced stimuli to enhance and reverse, respectively, the usual LH greater than RH asymmetry. These studies, however,…

Gender may be involved in the motivational processing of facial beauty. This study applied a behavioral probe, known to activate brain motivational regions, to healthy heterosexual subjects. Matched samples of men and women were administered two tasks: (a) key pressing to change the viewing time of average or beautiful female or male facial…

Objective: Functional MRI was used to determine differences in patterns of cortical activation between children who suffered perinatal left middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke and healthy children performing a silent verb generation task. Methods: Ten children with prior perinatal left MCA stroke (age 6-16 years) and ten healthy age matched…

Symmetry is an important concept in biology, being related to mate selection strategies, health, and survival of species. In human faces, the relevance of left-right symmetry to attractiveness and health is not well understood. We compared the appearance of facial attractiveness, health, and symmetry in three separate experiments. Participants…

Two experiments explored boundary conditions for the ubiquitous left-hemisphere advantage in visual-word recognition. Subjects perceptually identified words presented directly to the left or right hemisphere. Strong left-hemisphere advantages were observed for UPPERCASE and lowercase words. However, only a weak effect was observed for…

In a heterogeneous sample of 436 adult individuals who completed 42 mental ability tests, we evaluated the relative statistical performance of three major psychometric models of human intelligence-the Cattell-Horn fluid-crystallized model, Vernon's verbal-perceptual model, and Carroll's three-strata model. The verbal-perceptual model fit…

The present investigation was aimed to the study of the three attentional networks (Alerting, Orienting, and Executive Function) and their interactions. A modification of the task developed by Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, and Posner (2002) was used, in which a cost and benefit paradigm was combined with a flanker task and an alerting signal. We…

Recent empirical research into the brain, while reinforcing the view that we are extensively "programmed", does not refute the idea of a distinctive human mind. The human mind is primarily a product of the human capacity for a distinctive kind of language. Human language is thus what gives us our consciousness, reasoning capacity and autonomy. To…

Velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS), also known as 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, is a neurogenetic disorder that is associated with both learning disabilities and a consistent neuropsychological phenotype, including deficits in executive function, visuospatial perception, and working memory. Anatomic imaging studies have identified significant…

The study investigated the divergence in beginning reading methods between the United States (US) and England from 1998 to 2010. Researchers, policy makers, and publishers were interviewed to explore their knowledge and perceptions concerning how literacy policy was determined. The first three of twelve findings showed that despite the…