Recent studies suggest that longstanding findings of abnormal amygdala morphology in ASD may be related to symptoms of anxiety. To test this hypothesis, fifty-three children with ASD (mean age = 11.9) underwent structural MRI and were divided into subgroups to compare those with at least one anxiety disorder diagnosis (n = 29) to those without (n…

The "automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis" (Blomert, [Blomert, L., 2011]) proposes that dyslexia results from a failure to fully integrate letters and speech sounds into automated audio-visual objects. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of English-speaking children with dyslexic difficulties (N = 13) and samples of…

Background: Previous studies have documented differences in neural activation during language processing in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) in comparison with typically developing individuals matched for chronological age. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare activation during language processing in young…

Cognitive deficits in fibromyalgia may be specifically related to controlled processes, such as those measured by working memory or executive function tasks. This hypothesis was tested here by measuring controlled temporal preparation (temporal orienting) during a response inhibition (go no-go) task. Temporal orienting effects (faster reaction…

Evidence from experiments designed to elicit the phenomenon of perisaccadic mislocalization of briefly presented probe stimuli suggests that mechanisms implicated in the planning of a saccade are also implicated in the means by which spatial constancy is maintained across saccades. We postulated that impairments of visual attention observed in…

Early-onset schizophrenia appears to be clinically more severe than the adult-onset form of the disease. In a previous study, we showed that anatomically related grey and white matter abnormalities found in adolescents patients were larger and more widespread than what had been reported in the literature on adult schizophrenia. Particularly, we…

The striatum is considered to mediate some forms of procedural learning. Complex dynamic control (CDC) tasks involve an individual having to make a series of sequential decisions to achieve a specific outcome (e.g. learning to operate and control a car), and they involve procedural learning. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that…

Background: The computational grammatical complexity (CGC) hypothesis claims that children with G(rammatical)-specific language impairment (SLI) have a domain-specific deficit in the computational system affecting syntactic dependencies involving 'movement'. One type of such syntactic dependencies is filler-gap dependencies. In contrast, the…