Musical training has long been viewed as a model for experience-dependent brain plasticity. Reports of musical training-induced brain plasticity are largely based on cross-sectional studies comparing musicians to non-musicians, which cannot address whether musical training itself is sufficient to induce these neurobiological changes or whether…

The development of skills related to executive function (EF) in infancy, including their emergence, underlying neural mechanisms, and interconnections to other cognitive skills, is an area of increasing research interest. Here, we report on findings from a multidimensional dataset demonstrating that infants' behavioral performance on a flexible…

Child maltreatment is a significant problem in North America. Maltreatment comes in many forms, such as neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, abandonment, and traumatic world events. The maltreatment affects children's neurobiological development, and thus, potentially their future quality of social and psychological health. This article gives a…

Infantile spasms (IS) is a rare epileptic disorder occurring in children under the age of one that can often lead to severe developmental delays throughout life. Though over 200 etiologies have been associated with this disorder, many cases remain unexplained. Research into the etiology of IS has implicated causes such as exposure to prenatal…

Mother and child wellbeing are intimately connected during pregnancy and the first 12 months of the infant's life. The fetus and child directly experience the mother's life and are shaped by it. A mother's environmental experiences, physical health, and psychological distress affect her interactions with her infant, which in turn have…

Humans are born with the ability to mentally represent the approximate numerosity of a set of objects, but little is known about the brain systems that sub-serve this ability early in life and their relation to the brain systems underlying symbolic number and mathematics later in development. Here we investigate processing of numerical magnitudes…

Unlike adult memories that can be remembered for many years, memories that are formed early in life are more fragile and susceptible to being forgotten (a phenomenon known as "infantile" or "childhood" amnesia). Nonetheless, decades of research in both humans and nonhuman animals demonstrate the importance of early life…

Background: Animal research indicates that the neural substrates of emotion regulation may be persistently altered by early environmental exposures. If similar processes operate in human development then this is significant, as the capacity to regulate emotional states is fundamental to human adaptation. Methods: We utilised a 22-year longitudinal…

Long before empirical neurological research validated her insight, Montessori understood that healthy, full-term babies come equipped with a physiological passion for learning. Brain studies have confirmed that most of the brain's development and inner wiring occurs during the first 2 years of life. A newborn's neurons have sparse, weak…

Across the country, placements in foster care are rising. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that 273,539 children in the U.S. entered foster care. In 34 percent of those cases, parental drug abuse was one of the factors leading to the child's removal from their family. Additionally, the U.S. Substance Abuse and…

An individual's neurodevelopmental and cognitive sequelae to negative early experiences may, in part, be explained by genetic susceptibility. We examined whether extreme differences in the early caregiving environment, defined as exposure to severe psychosocial deprivation associated with institutional care compared to normative rearing,…

Poverty-associated chronic stress is a serious threat not only to a mother's mental health but also to maternal functioning. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that a mother's brain undergoes dynamic changes to support her transition to parenthood, including better emotion regulation and heightened sensitivity to infants. However, we propose that…

This study used fMRI to measure brain activity during adult processing of cries of infants with autistic disorder (AD) compared to cries of typically developing (TD) infants. Using whole brain analysis, we found that cries of infants with AD compared to those of TD infants elicited enhanced activity in brain regions associated with verbal and…

The present study aimed to uncover the neural activity associated with specific in-group and out-group word related stimuli, to examine the neuroanatomical basis of group membership concept representation, and investigate to what extent neural processes represent "in-group" differently from "out-group". Participants' brain activity was measured…

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was first included in the American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders" in 1980. Long used to describe the reactions of soldiers affected by stress in combat situations, PTSD is now recognised as a disorder affecting abused and neglected infants and…