If an examinee exerts inadequate effort to perform well during a psychological or neuropsychological exam, the resulting data will represent an inaccurate representation of the individual's true abilities and difficulties. In adult populations, methodologies to identify noncredible effort have grown exponentially in the last 2 decades. Though a…

Working with teenagers is not an easy task. This seems to be a notion shared by language teachers all over the world. While some instructors are very keen on working with this special age group, others are not fond of the challenge. The truth is that teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) to teens has never been easy. According to…

An explosion in the variety and availability of cognitive-enhancing drugs, from prescriptions like Ritalin to commercial drinks like NeuroFuel, raises concerns for scientists and educators alike--not just over the potential for abuse, but also over what educators and researchers consider, and how they approach, normal achievement. Evidence is…

In 2008, Rhode Island was in the early stages of refocusing its economic development efforts on transitioning to a knowledge-based economy. This move would require an educated workforce, largely deemed the responsibility of the state's 11 public and private institutions of higher education. For a state with slightly over a million residents and…

Background: There is debate as to whether chronic irritability (operationalized as severe mood dysregulation, SMD) is a developmental form of bipolar disorder (BD). Although structural brain abnormalities in BD have been demonstrated, no study compares neuroanatomy among SMD, BD, and healthy volunteers (HV) either cross-sectionally or over time.…

Constraint-induced (CI) therapy is a term given to a family of efficacious neurorehabilitation treatments including to date: upper extremity CI movement therapy, lower extremity CI movement therapy, pediatric CI therapy, and CI aphasia therapy. The purpose of this article is to outline the behavior analysis origins of CI therapy and the ways in…

Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders associated with Streptococcal infection (PANDAS) is a unique constellation of signs and symptoms that exist in a subset of children with rapid onset or exacerbation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and/or tic disorders due to an initial autoimmune reaction to a Group A Beta Hemolytic…

One important debate in psycholinguistics concerns the nature of morphological decomposition processes in visual word recognition (e.g., darkness = {dark} + {-ness}). One theory claims that these processes arise during orthographic analysis and prior to accessing meaning (Rastle & Davis, 2008), and another argues that these processes arise through…

For decades educational psychologists have bemoaned the black box approach of much research on learning, that is, the focus on product rather than process, and the absence of fine-grained analysis of the learning process in the individual. One way that progress has been made on this point in the last couple of decades is through cognitive…

In an experimental paradigm adapted from Hari (1995), forty observers listened via headphones to 8 binaural clicks: 4 left-ear leading followed by 4 right-ear leading with either 38 or 140 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Concurrently, they viewed either foveal or peripheral visual stimuli designed to activate either the parvocellular or…

Recent evidence suggests that blindness enables visual circuits to contribute to language processing. We examined whether this dramatic functional plasticity has a sensitive period. BOLD fMRI signal was measured in congenitally blind, late blind (blindness onset 9-years-old or later) and sighted participants while they performed a sentence…

There are a number of important developments that have occurred in New Jersey recently surrounding brain injury that may serve as an inspiration for school psychologists in other states. In this article, the authors discuss what is happening in New Jersey to increase awareness among school psychologists, other educators, the public, and public…

The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs.…

Aim: The purpose of this study was (1) to examine the changes in participation rates over 1 year among children and adolescents after acquired brain injury and (2) to explore the effect of child and family factors on these changes. Method: The participation levels of 136 children and young people (88 males; 48 females; age range 4y 11mo-17y 6mo;…

We used event-related brain potentials to clarify the role of phonology in activating the meanings of high-frequency words during skilled silent reading. Target homophones ("meet") in sentences such as "The students arranged to meet in the library to study" were replaced on some trials by either a high-frequency homophone mate…