Amino acids related to neurotransmitters and the GABAergic/glutamatergic system were measured using a 3 T-MRI instrument in 12 patients with autism and 10 normal controls. All measurements were performed in the frontal lobe (FL) and lenticular nuclei (LN) using a conventional sequence for n-acetyl aspartate (NAA) and glutamate (Glu), and the…

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics…

A major challenge in contemporary research is how to connect medical education and cognitive neuroscience and achieve synergy between these domains. Based on this starting point we discuss how this may result in a common language about learning, more educationally focused scientific inquiry, and multidisciplinary research projects. As the topic of…

The kana pick-out test has been widely used in Japan to evaluate the ability to divide attention in both adult and pediatric patients. However, the neural substrates underlying the ability to divide attention using the kana pick-out test, which requires participants to pick out individual letters (vowels) in a story while also reading for…

In contrast to models and theories that relate adult neurogenesis with the processes of learning and memory, almost no solid hypotheses have been formulated that involve a possible neurocomputational influence of adult neurogenesis on forgetting. Based on data from a previous study that implemented a simple but complete model of the main…

Background: The basal ganglia (BG) are involved in executive language functions (i.e., verbal fluency) through their connections with cortical structures. The caudate and putamen receive separate inputs from prefrontal and premotor cortices, and may differentially contribute to verbal fluency performance. We examined BG integrity in relation to…

Current research on analogy processing assumes that different conceptual relations are treated similarly. However, just as words and concepts are related in distinct ways, different kinds of analogies may employ distinct types of relationships. An important distinction in how words are related is the difference between associative (dog-bone) and…

Objective: Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) have reported greater amygdala and less dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) activation to facial expressions compared to healthy controls. The current study investigates whether these differences are associated with the early or late…

A role for the cerebellum in cognition has been proposed based on studies suggesting a profile of cognitive deficits due to cerebellar stroke. Such studies are limited in the determination of the detailed organisation of cerebellar subregions that are critical for different aspects of cognition. In this study we examined the correlation between…

This article suggests that ideas about adolescent brains and their development increasingly function as powerful truths in making sense of young people. In this context, the knowledge practices of the neurosciences and evolutionary and developmental psychology are deemed capable of producing what we have come to understand as the evidence on which…

Unaccusative verbs like "fall" are special in that their sole argument is syntactically generated at the object position of the verb rather than at the subject position. Unaccusative verbs are derived by a lexical operation that reduces the agent from transitive verbs. Their insertion into a sentence often involves a syntactic movement from the…

Suppressing irrelevant words is essential to successful speech production and is expected to involve general control mechanisms that reduce interference from task-unrelated processing. To investigate the neural mechanisms that suppress visual word interference, we used fMRI and a Stroop task, using a block design with an event-related analysis.…

Proteolysis by the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway (UPP) has emerged as a new molecular mechanism that controls wide-ranging functions in the nervous system, including fine-tuning of synaptic connections during development and synaptic plasticity in the adult organism. In the UPP, attachment of a small protein, ubiquitin, tags the substrates for…

Three levels of investigation underlie all biologically based attempts at classification of behaviorally defined developmental and psychiatric disorders: Level A, pseudo-categorical classification of mostly dimensional descriptions of behaviors and their disorders included in the 2013 American Psychiatric Association's Fifth Edition of the…

Background: Preterm infants are at high risk for adverse neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes. Family Nurture Intervention (FNI) in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is designed to counteract adverse effects of separation of mothers and their preterm infants. Here, we evaluate effects of FNI on neurobehavioral outcomes. Methods: Data…