Educational fMRI: From the Lab to the Classroom.

Functional MRI (fMRI) findings hold many potential applications for education, and yet, the translation of fMRI findings to education has not flowed. Here, we address the types of fMRI that could better support applications of neuroscience to the classroom. This 'educational fMRI' comprises eight main challenges: (1) collecting artifact-free fMRI data in school-aged participants and in vulnerable young populations, (2) investigating heterogenous cohorts with wide variability in learning abilities and disabilities, (3) studying the brain under natural and ecological conditions, given that many practical topics of interest for education can be addressed only in ecological contexts, (4) depicting complex age-dependent associations of brain and behaviour with multi-modal imaging, (5) assessing changes in brain function related to developmental trajectories and instructional intervention with longitudinal designs, (6) providing system-level mechanistic explanations of brain function, so that useful individualized predictions about learning can be generated, (7) reporting negative findings, so that resources are not wasted on developing ineffective interventions, and (8) sharing data and creating large-scale longitudinal data repositories to ensure transparency and reproducibility of fMRI findings for education.

Age Affects How Task Difficulty and Complexity Modulate Perceptual Decision-Making.

Decisions differ in difficulty and rely on perceptual information that varies in richness (complexity); aging affects cognitive function including decision-making, and yet, the interaction between difficulty and perceptual complexity have rarely been addressed in aging. Using a parametric fMRI modulation analysis and psychophysics, we address how task difficulty affects decision-making when controlling for the complexity of the perceptual context in which decisions are made. Perceptual complexity was varied in a factorial design while participants made perceptual judgments on the spatial frequency of two patches that either shared the same orientation (simple condition) or were orthogonal in orientation (complex condition).

Face perception develops similarly across viewpoint in children and adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder.

Atypical face perception has been associated with the socio-communicative difficulties that characterize autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Growing evidence, however, suggests that a widespread impairment in face perception is not as common as once thought. One important issue arising with the interpretation of this literature is the relationship between face processing and a more general perceptual tendency to focus on local rather than global information.

Behavioral evidence for a functional link between low- and mid-level visual perception in the autism spectrum.

Background: Most investigations of visuo-perceptual abilities in the Autism Spectrum (AS) are level-specific, using tasks that selectively solicit either lower- (i.e., spatial frequency sensitivity), mid- (i.