This paper reviews the literature exploring gender differences associated with the clinical presentation of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The potentially mediating effect of comorbid psychopathology, biological and neurodevelopmental implications on these gender differences is also discussed. A vastly heterogeneous condition, while females on…

Purpose: Individuals who stutter show sensorimotor deficiencies in speech and nonspeech movements. For the mandibular system, the authors dissociated the sense of kinesthesia from the efferent control component to examine whether kinesthetic integrity itself is compromised in stuttering or whether deficiencies occur only when generating motor…

Previous work has shown that children are able to make a spatial inference about adjacent locations that have only been experienced indirectly (Hazen, Lockman, & Pick, 1978). We sought to replicate this finding in rats, on a conceptually analogous task. In a first experiment, rats (n = 8) were given 110 training trials on a task in which they…

Neuro-education, a new frontier for educational researchers, has its passionate advocates and equally passionate detractors. Some philosophers, including Noel Purdy and Hugh Morrison, Andrew Davis, and Ralph Schumacher, have argued that the entire enterprise is misguided. I evaluate and challenge their arguments. This permits me to articulate my…

Atypical processing and integration of sensory inputs are hypothesized to play a role in unusual sensory reactions and social-cognitive deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Reports on the relationship between objective metrics of sensory processing and clinical symptoms, however, are surprisingly sparse. Here we examined the relationship…

This article reviews research on the effects of music instruction on general cognitive abilities. The review of more than 75 reports shows (1) the consistency in results pertaining to the short-term effects of music instruction on cognitive abilities and the lack of clear evidence on the long-term effects on intelligence; (2) the complex nature of…

Introduction: Although recent research has focused on the effects of maternal eating disorders (EDs) on children, little is known about the effect of maternal EDs on neurobiological outcomes in newborns and infants. This study is the first to investigate neurobehavioural regulation and cognitive development in newborns and infants of mothers with…

This paper is part two of the article entitled, "Dynamic Neuroscientific Systemology: Using Tri-Squared Meta-Analysis and Innovative Instructional Design to Develop a Novel Distance Education Model for the Systemic Creation of Engaging Online Learning Environments" published in the July-September 2015 issue of i-manager's "Journal…

Long-term potentiation (LTP) is an important process underlying learning and memory in the brain. At CA3-CA1 synapses in the hippocampus, three discrete forms of LTP (LTP1, 2, and 3) can be differentiated on the basis of maintenance and induction mechanisms. However, the relative roles of pre- and post-synaptic expression mechanisms in LTP1, 2,…

Anesthetic-induced changes in the neural activity of the brain have been recently utilized as a research model to investigate the neural mechanisms of phenomenal consciousness. However, the anesthesiologic definition of consciousness as "responsiveness to the environment" seems to sidestep the possibility that an unresponsive individual may have…

The aim of this study was to describe the profile of specific neonatal morbidities in children later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and to compare this profile with the profile of children with hyperkinetic disorder, cerebral palsy, epilepsy or intellectual disability. This is a Danish population based cohort study, including all…

Success in second language learning is often related to the concept of 'motivation'. Motivation is the most used concept for explaining the failure or success of a language learner. This paper collected and reviewed the literature of motivation in second language acquisition (SLA) form prominent journals in the field. The role of motivation as one…

The total number of anatomy teaching hours has declined in medical courses worldwide. Conversely, face-to-face teaching in undergraduate neuroanatomy at Macquarie University increased by 50% in 2011. Our aim was to investigate whether this influenced student performance and overall satisfaction with the course. One hundred eighty-one students…

Selective attention in the presence of distraction is a key aspect of healthy cognition. The underlying neurobiological processes, have not, however, been functionally well characterized. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine how ecologically relevant distracting noise affects cortical activity in 27…

This study examined the effects of teachers' biology-specific dimensions of professional knowledge--pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and content knowledge (CK)--and cognitively activating biology instruction, as a feature of instructional quality, on students' learning. The sample comprised 39 German secondary school teachers whose lessons on…