Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is an acquired neurodegenerative syndrome that has specific and devastating effects on an individual's speech and language ability. Based on a detailed assessment of behavior and cognition, combined with structural neuroimaging data and pathological evidence, PPA is typically classified into three variants: the…

Background: Aphasia is often accompanied by impairment of non-language cognitive functions. Assessment of cognitive capacity in people with aphasia (PWA) with standard neuropsychological methods may be problematic due to their language difficulties. Numerous experimental studies indicate that P300 may be considered as an index of cognitive…

The brain organizes somatosensory experience based on the body location from which it originated and the pathway by which in arrived. Here, I present a classroom discussion-based activity centered around the concept of a phantom limb to allow students to explore how cortical representation of sensory experience can be altered. The goal of the…

The thalamic nuclei are thought to play a critical role in recognition memory. Specifically, the anterior thalamic nuclei and medial dorsal nuclei may serve as critical output structures in distinct hippocampal and perirhinal cortex systems, respectively. Existing evidence indicates that damage to the anterior thalamic nuclei leads to impairments…

The promise of educational neuroscience lies in its potential to uncover mechanistic insights into the science of learning. However, to realize that promise, the field must overcome a fundamental difference between the constituent disciplines: neuroscience is primarily concerned with understanding how the brain works; whereas education attempts to…

"Cerebral visual impairment" (CVI) is defined as vision impairment that occurs as a result of bilateral dysfunction of the optic radiations or visual cortex or both. It can coexist with ocular and ocular motor disorders, and it can also be the result of perinatal brain dysfunction or can be caused by trauma (Roman et al., 2010). CVI is…

The ability to understand emotional experiences of others, empathy, is a valuable skill for effective social interactions. Various types of training increase empathy in adolescents, but their impact on brain circuits underlying empathy has not been examined. Video games provide a unique medium familiar and engaging to adolescents and can be used…

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our…

Differentiated instruction has emerged as a research-based approach to teaching that meets the diverse needs of students based upon learner readiness, interests, and learning profile, grounded in the socio-cultural, multiple intelligences, and brain-based learning theories. The purpose of this basic qualitative inquiry was to explore teachers'…

This article is part of an ongoing series by the authors and the Deep Play Research Group, which focuses on the intersection of creativity and technology in education. In this article, Dr. Anthony Brandt, professor of composition and theory at Rice University shares his thoughts about the study of creativity. He uses his experiences as a musician…

Linguistic geniuses such as Heinrich Schliemann have long fascinated many with their exceptional capabilities to master multiple languages on top of their own mother tongues. These individuals are believed to be able to extract the probabilistic, abstract patterns underlying a target form's linguistic and frequency distribution in second language…

Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and…

Conditioned fear memories that are context-specific shortly after conditioning generalize over time. We exposed rats to a context reminder 30 d after conditioning, which served to reinstate context-specificity, and investigated how this reminder alters retrieval-induced activity in the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex (aCC) relative to a…

As highlighted by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998), parents play a critical role in children's socioemotional development, in part, by shaping how children and adolescents process, respond to, and regulate their emotions (i.e., emotional reactivity/regulation). Although evidence for associations between parenting behavior and youth's…

For centuries, adults may have relied on pedagogies that promote rote memory for the learning of foreign languages through word associations and grammar rules. This contrasts sharply with child language learning which unfolds in socially interactive contexts. In this paper, we advocate an approach to study the social brain of language by grounding…