Parents' alcohol use may influence adolescent substance use and substance use intentions. Prior research has linked adolescents' emotion reactivity with parental drinking behaviors and adolescent substance use. The present study investigated whether sub-clinical maternal alcohol use relates to adolescent neural emotion reactivity and substance use…

Numbers and letters are culturally created symbols that acquire meaning through extensive training, significantly influencing brain function. The distinct hemispheric specialization of cortical regions for these categories has been hypothesized to relate to the co-activated brain networks: the left language regions for letters, and the right…

Purpose: Converging research suggests that speech timing, including altered rate and pausing when speaking, can distinguish autistic individuals from nonautistic peers. Although speech timing can impact effective social communication, it remains unclear what mechanisms underlie individual differences in speech timing in autism. Method: The present…

Identifying the neural processes that underlie the association between children's early adverse experiences and cognitive development could inform more effective intervention strategies. The goal of the current study (data collected 2015-2021) was to examine relations among early experiences at 6 months, electroencephalography (EEG) theta power at…

Despite the enormous clinical relevance of disordered sleep to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), to date, few studies have employed objective measures of sleep architecture in ASD. Previous studies have identified an association between slow wave activity in electroencephalography (EEG) at sleep onset and daytime cognitive and affective functioning…

Visual information is organised according to visual grouping principles. In visual grouping tasks individuals with ASD have shown equivocal performance. We explored neural correlates of Gestalt grouping in individuals with and without ASD. Neuromagnetic activity of individuals with (15) and without (18) ASD was compared during a visual grouping…

Longitudinal changes in trusting behavior across adolescence and their neural correlates were examined. Neural regions of interest (ROIs) included the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), left anterior insula (AI), bilateral ventral striatum (VS), and right dorsal striatum (DS). Participants (wave 1 age: M =…

Insofar as the autistic-like phenotype presents in the general population, it consists of partially dissociable traits, such as social and sensory issues. Here, we investigate individual differences in cortical organisation related to autistic-like traits. Connectome gradient decomposition based on resting state fMRI data reliably reveals a…

Language is a unique skill used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings. For most individuals, language is understood through different sensory modalities--for instance, hearing auditory words relies on audition, while perceiving visual speech via lipreading and reading written text both utilize the visual system. Although these different…

Phonological awareness is the stepping-stone to learning to read as it helps children map language sounds onto letters. Theories of bilingualism posit that phonological awareness is a language-common literacy skill. However, bilingual learners are also thought to build language-specific representations. To illuminate common and specific…

Observational learning is essential for the acquisition of new behavior in educational practices and daily life and serves as an important mechanism for human cognitive and social-emotional development. However, we know little about its underlying neurocomputational mechanisms from a developmental perspective. In this study we used model-based…

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is defined as difficulties in learning to read even with normal intelligence and adequate educational guidance. Deficits in implicit sequence learning (ISL) abilities have been reported in children with DD. We investigated brain plasticity in a group of 17 children with DD, compared with 18 typically developing (TD)…

Linguistic categories can impact visual perception. For instance, learning that two objects have different names can enhance their discriminability. Previous studies have identified a typical pattern of categorical perception, characterized by faster discrimination of stimuli from different categories, a neural mismatch response during early…

People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties mentally simulating events, perhaps due to a difficulty mentally generating and maintaining a coherent spatial scene -- that is, 'scene construction'. The current study compared scene construction ability between autistic adults (N = 55) and age-, gender- and Intelligence…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is clinically characterized by social and communication difficulties as well as repetitive behaviors. Many children with ASD also suffer from anxiety, which has been associated with alterations in amygdala structure. In this work, the association between amygdala subnuclei volumes and anxiety was assessed in a cohort…