Multisensory integration of spatial information occurs late in childhood, at around eight years (Gori, Del Viva, Sandini, & Burr, 2008). For younger children, the haptic system dominates size discrimination and vision dominates orientation discrimination: the dominance may reflect "sensory calibration," and could have direct consequences on…

Within the framework of Friederici's (2002) neurocognitive model of sentence processing, the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) in event-related potentials (ERPs) has been claimed to be a brain marker of syntactic first-pass parsing. As ELAN components seem to be exclusively elicited by word category violations (phrase structure violations),…

Until a decade ago, it was assumed that males with the fragile X premutation were unaffected by any cognitive phenotype. Here we examined the extent to which CGG repeat toxicity extends to visuospatial functioning in male fragile X premutation carriers who are asymptomatic for a late-onset neurodegenerative disorder, fragile X-associated…

Theory of mind requires belief- "and" desire-understanding. Event-related brain potential (ERP) research on belief- and desire-reasoning in adults found mid-frontal activations for both desires and beliefs, and selective right-posterior activations "only" for beliefs. Developmentally, children understand desires before beliefs; thus, a critical…

The synaptic Ras/Rap-GTPase-activating protein (SynGAP1) plays a unique role in regulating specific downstream intracellular events in response to N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) activation. Constitutive heterozygous loss of SynGAP1 disrupts NMDAR-mediated physiological and behavioral processes, but the disruptions might be of developmental…

This discussion article addresses issues related to expansion of the Wechsler model from four to five factors; multiple broad CHC abilities measured by the Arithmetic subtest; advantages and disadvantages of including complex tasks requiring integration of multiple broad abilities when measuring intelligence; limitations of factor analysis, which…

It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

More than 20?years ago, Minshew and colleagues proposed the Complex Information Processing model of autism in which the impairment is characterized as a generalized deficit involving multiple modalities and cognitive domains that depend on distributed cortical systems responsible for higher order abilities. Subsequent behavioral work revealed a…

The etiology of autism is unclear, however autism is considered as a multifactorial disorder that is influenced by neurological, environmental, immunological and genetic factors. Growth factors, including epidermal growth factor (EGF), play an important role in the celluler proliferation and the differentiation of the central and peripheral…

Long-term memory and plasticity, including long-term synaptic facilitation (LTF) of the "Aplysia" sensorimotor synapse, depend on the activation of transcription factors that regulate genes necessary for synaptic plasticity. In the present study we found that treatment with 5-HT and behavioral training produce biphasic changes in the expression of…

The interaction between amygdala-driven and hippocampus-driven activities is expected to explain why emotion enhances episodic memory recognition. However, overwhelming behavioral evidence regarding the emotion-induced enhancement of immediate and delayed episodic memory recognition has not been obtained in humans. We found that the recognition…

Automatic imitation--the unintended copying of observed actions--is thought to be a behavioral product of the mirror neuron system (MNS). Evidence that the MNS develops through associative learning comes from previous research showing that automatic imitation is attenuated by countermirror training, in which the observation of one action is paired…

Previous studies have found a late frontal-central audiovisual interaction during the time period about 150-220 ms post-stimulus. However, it is unclear to which process is this audiovisual interaction related: to processing of acoustical features or to classification of stimuli? To investigate this question, event-related potentials were recorded…

In this article, we present a perspective on the role of the hippocampal system in generalization, instantiated in a computational model called REMERGE (recurrency and episodic memory results in generalization). We expose a fundamental, but neglected, tension between prevailing computational theories that emphasize the function of the hippocampus…

Understanding the functional neuroanatomy of planning and problem solving may substantially benefit from better insight into the chronology of the cognitive processes involved. Based on the assumption that regularities in cognitive processing are reflected in overtly observable eye-movement patterns, here we recorded eye movements while…