The creation of this document has been driven by an intensive review process by the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child and the National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs to assure the credibility of its scientific content. Over the past 12 years, the Council's ongoing work to bring science to bear on public policies for…

These are the key findings from the "From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts: A Science-Based Approach to Building a More Promising Future for Young Children and Families". Early childhood is a time of great promise and rapid change, when the architecture of the developing brain is most open to the influences of relationships and…

Background: Uncertainty remains about the rate of specific psychiatric disorders and associated predictive factors for very preterm (VPT) children. The aims of this study were to document rates of psychiatric disorders in VPT children aged 7 years compared with term born children, and to examine potential predictive factors for psychiatric…

Prior research shows that childhood poverty as well as chronic stress can damage children's executive functioning (EF) capacities, including working memory. However, it is also clear that not all children suffer the same degree of adverse consequences from risk exposure. We show that chronic stress early in life (ages 9-13) links childhood…

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal…

A decline in the ability to identify fearful expression has been frequently reported in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In patients with severe destruction of the bilateral amygdala, similar difficulties have been reduced by using an explicit visual exploration strategy focusing on gaze. The current study assessed the possibility of…

Deficits in cognitive control are implicated in cocaine dependence. Previously, combining functional magnetic resonance imaging and a stop signal task, we demonstrated altered cognitive control in cocaine-dependent individuals. However, the clinical implications of these cross-sectional findings and, in particular, whether the changes were…

Report of a second target (T2) is impaired when presented within 500 ms of the first (T1). This attentional blink (AB) is known to cause a delay in T2 processing during which T2 must be stored in a labile memory buffer. We explored the buffer's characteristics using different types of masks after T2. These characteristics were inferred by…

Patients with right hemisphere lesions often omit or misread words on the left side of a text or the initial letters of single words, a phenomenon termed neglect dyslexia (ND). Omissions of words on the contralesional side of the page are considered as egocentric or space-based errors, whereas misread words can be viewed as a type of…

One of the most frequent symptoms of unilateral stroke is aphasia, the impairment or loss of language functions. Over the past few years, behavioral and neuroimaging studies have shown that rehabilitation interventions can promote neuroplastic changes in aphasic patients that may be associated with the improvement of language functions. Following…

A growing number of studies show that visual mental imagery recruits the same brain areas as visual perception. Although the necessity of hV5/MT+ for motion perception has been revealed by means of TMS, its relevance for motion imagery remains unclear. We induced a direction-selective adaptation in hV5/MT+ by means of an MAE while subjects…

Previous research shows that sensory and motor systems interact during perception, but how these connections among systems are created during development is unknown. The current work exposes young children to novel "verbs" and objects through either (a) actively exploring the objects or (b) by seeing an experimenter interact with the objects.…

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to contribute to memory processes such as encoding representations into long-term-memory (LTM) and retrieving these representations from LTM. However, the details of the PFC's contribution to LTM processes are not well known. To examine the characteristics of the PFC's contribution to LTM processes, we analyzed…

The evidence for a role of the striatum in the acquisition of uncued instrumental responding is ambiguous. It has been shown that post-session infusions of anisomycin into the core of the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) impaired instrumental acquisition, but pre-training lesions of the NAcc suggest that it is not necessary. Recently, we demonstrated that…

Objective: Pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder is characterized by abnormalities of frontal-striatal-thalamic circuitry that appear near illness onset and persist over its course. Distinct frontal-striatal-thalamic loops through cortical centers for cognitive control (anterior cingulate cortex) and emotion processing (ventral medial frontal…