This study used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of supernatural fiction, featuring either fictional or realistic characters, compared to real-world stories. Participants' brain activations were recorded while they read supernatural/realistic scenarios. Results showed that…

The consolidation process stabilizes a new initially labile memory. This consolidation could operate on a shorter timescale during wakefulness after initial motor learning. Within micro-offline learning states, sequences of simple individual actions learned through interleaved practice are condensed into a unified skill through a time-dependent…

While studies have documented neural correlates of language delay in toddlers with developmental conditions, those at genetic risk for language delay, and those born premature, no studies have examined neural correlates in toddlers exhibiting early language delay without known aetiology. This study examines brain morphometry in toddlers with and…

Visual attention develops rapidly across the first postnatal year, from reflexive eye movements driven by low-level stimulus properties to increasingly voluntary eye movements influenced by higher-order factors. To test the hypothesis that development reflects guidance by increasingly abstract features, we used representational similarity analysis…

Aperiodic electroencephalography (EEG) activity is hypothesized to index biological mechanisms that underpin brain functioning. This longitudinal study characterized the developmental trajectories of the aperiodic slope (i.e., aperiodic exponent) and offset from infancy to 7 years of age in a US community sample (N = 391, 46.5% female,…

Background: People with right hemisphere damage (PwRHD) are often reported to produce tangential or irrelevant utterances. This may be related to their conversational difficulties, including performance in making relevant responses to questions. Clinical interactions represent a major type of communicative activity that PwRHD frequently attend and…

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that human and nonhuman animals have perceptually-based abilities to process magnitudes of nonsymbolic ratios (e.g., ratios composed by juxtaposing two-line segments). In prior work, we have extended the neuronal recycling hypothesis to include neurocognitive architectures for nonsymbolic ratio…

Feedback drives creativity, yet how individuals benefit from it remains unclear. This study explored the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which interpersonal feedback promotes creativity. The fNIRS measured interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) during feedback, focusing on the prefrontal cortex and the right temporoparietal area.…

The human brain's ability to adapt and change in response to environmental inputs drives nearly all forms of learning throughout the lifespan. The unique plasticity of the human brain allows for the uptake of sociocultural inventions, such as reading and mathematics, through widespread changes across a range of cortical areas and white matter…

Previous studies have insufficiently explored the influence of task and interpersonal interdependence on synchronous cooperation behavior. To address this gap, this study utilized fNIRS hyperscanning technique to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms within both friend and stranger dyads engaging in various levels of interdependent…

There are large individual differences in arithmetic skills. Although a number of brain-wide association studies have attempted to identify the neural correlates of these individual differences, studies have focused on relatively small sample sizes and have yielded inconsistent results. In the current voxel-based morphometry study, we merged six…

Procedural learning difficulties are commonly reported in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), yet the neural basis of this impairment remains unclear. This study addressed this gap by examining the correlation between cortical oscillatory activity and procedural learning of a sequence of finger movements in children with and…

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy ([superscript 1]H-MRS) has shown inconsistent alterations in brain metabolites of adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigated brain metabolites in the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala of 24 drug-naive adults with ASD and no intellectual disability and 24 non-ASD control subjects, using…

Executive control (EC) emerges in the first year of life, with the ability to inhibit prepotent responses (inhibitory control [IC]) and to flexibly readapt (cognitive flexibility [CF]) steadily improving. Simultaneously, electrophysiological brain activity undergoes profound reconfiguration, which has been linked to individual variability in EC.…

Newborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from the speech input, that is, they show greater brain activation in the bilateral temporal and left inferior frontal regions to trisyllabic pseudowords of the form AAB (e.g., "babamu") than to random ABC sequences (e.g., "bamuge"). Whether this ability is…