Despite many disagreements on the utility of neuropsychological applications in schools, executive function measures have been found to be useful across a variety of areas and ages. In addition, many disagreements are extant in discussions of the maturational course of the development of executive functioning abilities that are dependent on…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

In response to M. Rawson's paper, the author uses an analogy with coronary artery disease to show that current brain research is not entirely at odds with the position that dyslexia may be a developmental variation, rather than a defect. (Author/DB)

Fourteen right-handed stutterers and 14 normal speakers responded to monaurally presented stimuli with their right and left hands. Results suggested a bilateral model of neurolinguistic organization for stutterers in which both hemispheres must participate simultaneously in the decoding process. (Author/DB)

Research on neural networks and hippocampal function demonstrating how mammals construct mental maps and develop navigation strategies is being used to create Intelligent Autonomous Mobile Robots (IAMRs). Such robots are able to recognize landmarks and navigate without "vision." (SK)

When neurologically normal individuals bisect a horizontal line as accurately as possible, they reliably show a slight leftward error. This leftward inaccuracy is called "pseudoneglect" because errors made by neurologically normal individuals are directionally opposite to those made by persons with visuospatial neglect (Jewell & McCourt, 2000). In…

The purpose of the present study was to identify differences between cerebral hemispheres for processing temporal intervals ranging from .9 to 1.4s. The intervals to be judged were marked by series of brief visual signals located in the left or the right visual field. Series of three (two standards and one comparison) or five intervals (four…

In this paper we review the literature on visual constraints in written word processing. We notice that not all letters are equally visible to the reader. The letter that is most visible is the letter that is fixated. The visibility of the other letters depends on the distance between the letters and the fixation location, whether the letters are…

Through much is known about the N400 component, an event-related EEG potential that is sensitive to semantic manipulations, it is unclear whether modulations of N400 amplitude reflect automatic processing, controlled processing, or both. We examined this issue using a semantic judgment task that manipulated local and global contextual cues. Word…

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad…

"Science Briefs" summarize the findings and implications of a recent study in basic science or clinical research. This brief reports on the study. This Brief summarizes the findings and implications of "Prenatal Exposure to Ultrasound Waves Impacts Neuronal Migration in Mice" (E. S. B. C. Ang, Jr.; V. Gluncic; A. Duque; M. E. Schafer; and P.…

There has been considerable debate as to whether structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) support both memory and perception, in particular whether the perirhinal cortex may be involved in the perceptual discrimination of complex objects with a large number of overlapping features. Similar experiments testing the discrimination of blended…

Results from recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies investigating brain processes involved in the detection and analysis of emotional facial expression are reviewed. In all experiments, emotional faces were found to trigger an increased ERP positivity relative to neutral faces. The onset of this emotional expression effect was…

In this paper we present the "grounded adaptive agent" computational framework for studying the emergence of communication and language. This modeling framework is based on simulations of population of cognitive agents that evolve linguistic capabilities by interacting with their social and physical environment (internal and external symbol…

Extinction of conditioned fear is an important model both of inhibitory learning and of behavior therapy for human anxiety disorders. Like other forms of learning, extinction learning is long-lasting and depends on regulated gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms make an important contribution to persistent changes in gene expression; therefore,…