Abnormalities in CHRNA7, the alpha7-nicotinic receptor gene, have been reported in autism spectrum disorder. These genetic abnormalities potentially decrease the receptor's expression and diminish its functional role. This double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study in two adult patients investigated whether an investigational…

Models of language acquisition are constrained by the information that learners can extract from their input. Experiment 1 investigated whether 3-month-old infants are able to encode a repeated, unsegmented sequence of five syllables. Event-related-potentials showed that infants reacted to a change of the initial or the final syllable, but not to…

Parenting recruits a distributed network of brain structures (and neuromodulators) that coordinates caregiving responses attuned to the young's affect, needs, and developmental stage. Many of these structures and connections undergo significant structural and functional plasticity, mediated by the interplay between maternal hormones and social…

The article explores several perspectives on the interconnection between genre and identity, an issue that has generated significant scholarship in rhetorical genre studies. It suggests that current work in neuroplasticity--that is, changes in the brain that can occur through learning and experience--complicates and problematizes the issue and is…

A new solution is offered to the Infant Language Acquisition Problem, rejecting both of Chomsky's alternatives. It proposes that the infant does not acquire his mother tongue by mastering its grammar, whether by inference from personal experience or via an innate Language Acquisition Device such as the UG, but that the language he hears is all…

The purpose of this study was to explore if by integrating Brain-based learning principles with a constructivist approach to English oral communication at a higher education institution, ESL participants would develop their English oral communication fluency. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) [The dissertation citations contained here are…

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment," respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by "in"…

The notion that investment in human capital is associated with better economic outcomes was coined in the U.S. and is assumed to translate equally across nations regardless of countries' socio-economic and political situation. The purpose of this study is to examine whether human capital tenets hold in European countries that transitioned from…

Students in performance situations sometimes experience physiological symptoms that inhibit their ability to perform as expressively as they otherwise might possess the understanding and ability to do. As students set out to perform with an expressive mindset, the brain's limbic system may detect some perceived danger in the situation and…

Cognitive control has long been one of the most active areas of computational modeling work in cognitive science. The focus on computational models as a medium for specifying and developing theory predates the PDP books, and cognitive control was not one of the areas on which they focused. However, the framework they provided has injected work on…

Previous investigations found that a subset of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in California possessed plasma autoantibodies that reacted intensely with brain interneurons or other neural profiles. Moreover, for several cohorts of American women, maternal autoantibody reactivity to specific fetal brain proteins was highly specific to…

Reconsolidation is necessary for the restabilization of reactivated memory traces. However, experimental parameters have been suggested as boundary conditions for this process. Here we investigated the role of a spatial memory trace's age, strength, and update on the reconsolidation process in mice. We first found that protein synthesis is…

Unlike adult memories that can be remembered for many years, memories that are formed early in life are more fragile and susceptible to being forgotten (a phenomenon known as "infantile" or "childhood" amnesia). Nonetheless, decades of research in both humans and nonhuman animals demonstrate the importance of early life…

Neurotrophins are critically involved in developmental processes such as neuronal cell survival, growth, and differentiation, as well as in adult synaptic plasticity contributing to learning and memory. Our previous studies examining neurotrophins and memory formation in "Aplysia" showed that a TrkB ligand is required for MAPK…

Purpose: One possible source of tense and agreement limitations in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a weakness in appreciating structural dependencies that occur in many sentences in the input. This possibility was tested in the present study. Method: Children with a history of SLI (H-SLI; n = 12; M = 9;7 [years;months]) and…