Relationships between sprint skating performance and insole plantar forces in national-level hockey athletes.

Background: Sprint skating is essential for competitive success in hockey. Previous studies have highlighted various measures of lower-body strength and power as key factors influencing sprint performance. However, while these studies have indicated a significant association between the ability to exert greater force and impulse into the ice surface, and the capacity to achieve faster sprint skating speeds, the direct relationship between these factors remains largely inferred.

Early dissociation of numbers and letters in the human brain.

Numbers and letters are culturally created symbols which are learned through repeated training. This experience leads to a functional specialization of the perceptual system of our brain. Recent evidence suggests a neural dissociation between these two symbols.

Is the LAN effect in morphosyntactic processing an ERP artifact?

The left anterior negativity (LAN) is an ERP component that has been often associated with morphosyntactic processing, but recent reports have questioned whether the LAN effect, in fact, exists. The present project examined whether the LAN effect, observed in the grand average response to local agreement violations, is the result of the overlap between two different ERP effects (N400, P600) at the level of subjects (n = 80), items (n = 120), or trials (n = 6160). By-subject, by-item, and by-trial analyses of the ERP effect between 300 and 500 ms showed a LAN for 55% of the participants, 46% of the items, and 49% of the trials.

Second language syntactic processing revealed through event-related potentials: an empirical review.

Learning a second language (L2) can be crucial in the present globalized society. However, reaching the level of L1 performance of native speakers is still a challenge for many. Distinct factors could account for the persistent gap observed between natives' and non-natives' syntactic abilities: L1-L2 differences, AoA, proficiency, L2 immersion duration, L2 training duration.

Cognitive characterization of children with Dravet syndrome: A neurodevelopmental perspective.

Dravet syndrome (DS) is an epilepsy of infantile onset, usually related to a mutation in gene sodium channel alpha 1 subunit, that leads to different typological seizures before the first year of life. Although most research has focused on the clinical description of the syndrome, some recent studies have focused on its impact on cognitive development, identifying both motor disorders and visual-processing deficits as basic factors affected in adults and children with DS. In this article, we designed a cross-sectional study to examine the cognitive phenotype of children affected by DS from a neurodevelopmental perspective.

Brain morphometry of Dravet syndrome.

The aim of this study was to identify differential global and local brain structural patterns in Dravet Syndrome (DS) patients as compared with a control subject group, using brain morphometry techniques which provide a quantitative whole-brain structural analysis that allows for specific patterns to be generalized across series of individuals. Nine patients with the diagnosis of DS that tested positive for mutation in the SCN1A gene and nine well-matched healthy controls were investigated using voxel brain morphometry (VBM), cortical thickness and cortical gyrification measurements. Global volume reductions of gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) were related to DS.

Error-related activity and correlates of grammatical plasticity.

Cognitive control involves not only the ability to manage competing task demands, but also the ability to adapt task performance during learning. This study investigated how violation-, response-, and feedback-related electrophysiological (EEG) activity changes over time during language learning. Twenty-two Dutch learners of German classified short prepositional phrases presented serially as text.