Abnormalities in cognition, academic performance and brain volumetrics have been reported in children with chronic epilepsy. The nature and degree to which these problems may be present at epilepsy onset or may instead become more evident over time remains to be determined. This study characterizes neuropsychological status, brain structure and…

Auditory evoked responses to a violin tone and a noise-burst stimulus were recorded from 4- to 6-year-old children in four repeated measurements over a 1-year period using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Half of the subjects participated in musical lessons throughout the year; the other half had no music lessons. Auditory evoked magnetic fields…

This review discusses the important contribution made by one particular theoretical model of reading--the dual route model--to the identification and understanding of different varieties of developmental dyslexia. The model itself is first outlined, and the particular types of reading disorder that would be predicted to occur based on this model…

The present study compared object and action naming in patients with Alzheimer's dementia. We tested the hypothesis put forward in (some) previous studies that in Alzheimer's dementia the production of verbs, that is required in action naming, is better preserved than the production of nouns, that is required in object naming. The possible reason…

Music, as language, is a universal human trait. Throughout human history and across all cultures, people have produced and enjoyed music. Despite its ubiquity, the musical capacity is rarely studied as a biological function. Music is typically viewed as a cultural invention. In this paper, the evidence bearing on the biological perspective of the…

Neurogenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease involve a transformation between two peptide and protein structures of alpha-helices and beta-sheets, where the peptide backbone can also participate in metal ion binding in addition to histidine residues. However, the complete absence of change in conformation of Coiled…

Are you looking for a book that explains all the key ideas on how children learn and how best to support children in that learning? Covering all major themes, this book offers: (1) An introduction to main theories of learning and development from birth to primary including brain and emotional and social development; (2) An introduction to what…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explore a method of measuring physiologic and perceived stress in individuals with aphasia by investigating salivary cortisol reactivity and subjectively perceived stress in response to a standardized linguistic task. Method: Fifteen individuals with aphasia and 15 age-matched healthy controls participated in a…

Objective: To test the hypothesis that young girls and boys with autism exhibit different profiles of neuroanatomical abnormality relative to each other and relative to typically developing children. Method: Structural magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure gray and white matter volumes (whole cerebrum, cerebral lobes, and cerebellum) and…

Although there is a strong link between the right hemisphere and understanding emotional prosody in speech, there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. This report describes two experiments which compared how listeners with and without focal right hemisphere…

Objective: Past investigations indicate facial emotion-processing abnormalities in pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD) subjects. However, the extent to which these deficits represent state- and trait-related factors is unclear. We investigated facial affect processing in acutely ill and clinically stabilized children with PBD and matched healthy…

The prevalence and cost of chronic pain is a major physical and mental health care problem in the United States today. As a result, there has been a recent explosion of research on chronic pain, with significant advances in better understanding its etiology, assessment, and treatment. The purpose of the present article is to provide a review of…

Objective: A review of amphetamine treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was conducted, to obtain information on the long-term neurological consequences of this therapy. Method: Several databases were accessed for research articles on the effects of amphetamine in the brain of laboratory animals and ADHD diagnosed…

Many studies have shown that infants prefer infant-directed (ID) speech to adult-directed (AD) speech. ID speech functions to aid language learning, obtain and/or maintain an infant's attention, and create emotional communication between the infant and caregiver. We examined psychophysiological responses to ID speech that varied in affective…

The international recruitment by countries of the North of teachers from less developed countries has become a controversial aspect of the problem of "brain drain". As a political and economic issue, the argument is that it reduces human capital within the education system and leads to the movement of highly skilled teachers from…