Early maturation of neural auditory novelty detection - Typical development with no major effects of dyslexia risk or music intervention.

Objective: To determine the early development of novelty detection and the effect of familial dyslexia risk and infant music intervention on this development.

Methods: In the longitudinal DyslexiaBaby study, we investigated the maturation of novelty-P3 and late-discriminative negativity (LDN) event-related potentials to novel sounds at birth (N = 177) and at the ages of 6 (N = 83) and 28 months (N = 131).

Results: Novelty-P3 was elicited at all ages, whereas LDN was elicited at 6 and 28 months.

Establishing neural representations for new word forms in 12-month-old infants.

During the first year of life, infants start to learn the lexicon of their native language. Word learning includes the establishment of longer-term representations for the phonological form and the meaning of the word in the brain, as well as the link between them. However, it is not known how the brain processes word forms immediately after they have been learned.

Infant neural speech encoding is associated with pre-reading skill development.

Objective: We longitudinally investigated whether infant P1 and N2 ERPs recorded in newborns and at 28 months could predict pre-reading skills at 28 months and 4-5 years.

Methods: We recorded ERPs to a pseudoword in newborns and at 28 months in a sample over-represented by infants with familial dyslexia risk. Using multiple linear regression models, we examined P1 and N2 associations with pre-reading skills at 28 months and 4-5 years.

Infant mismatch responses to speech-sound changes predict language development in preschoolers at risk for dyslexia.

Objective: We investigated how infant mismatch responses (MMRs), which have the potential for providing information on auditory discrimination abilities, could predict subsequent development of pre-reading skills and the risk for familial dyslexia.

Methods: We recorded MMRs to vowel, duration, and frequency deviants in pseudo-words at birth and 28 months in a sample over-represented by infants with dyslexia risk. We examined MMRs' associations with pre-reading skills at 28 months and 4-5 years and compared the results in subgroups with vs.

Prerequisites of language acquisition in the newborn brain.

Learning to decode and produce speech is one of the most demanding tasks faced by infants. Nevertheless, infants typically utter their first words within a year, and phrases soon follow. Here we review cognitive abilities of newborn infants that promote language acquisition, focusing primarily on studies tapping neural activity.

Neural phoneme discrimination in variable speech in newborns - Associations with dyslexia risk and later language skills.

A crucial skill in infant language acquisition is learning of the native language phonemes. This requires the ability to group complex sounds into distinct auditory categories based on their shared features. Problems in phonetic learning have been suggested to underlie language learning difficulties in dyslexia, a developmental reading-skill deficit.

Development of associations between elementary school students' mindsets and attentional neural processing of feedback in an arithmetic task.

The aim of this study was to examine the development of the associations between elementary school students' mindsets and the attentional neural processing of positive and negative feedback in math. For this, we analyzed data collected twice from 100 Finnish elementary school students. During the autumn semesters of their 3rd and 4th grade, the participants' general intelligence mindset and math ability mindset were measured with a questionnaire, and their brain responses elicited by performance-relevant feedback were recorded during an arithmetic task.

On the relationship between occlusion times and in-car glance durations in simulated driving.

Drivers have spare visual capacity in driving, and often this capacity is used for engaging in secondary in-car tasks. Previous research has suggested that the spare visual capacity could be estimated with the occlusion method. However, the relationship between drivers' occlusion times and in-car glance duration preferences has not been sufficiently investigated for granting occlusion times the role of an estimate of spare visual capacity.

Neuroaesthetic exploration on the cognitive processing behind repeating graphics.

Repeating graphics are common research objects in modern design education. However, we do not exactly know the attentional processes underlying graphic artifacts consisting of repeating rhythms. In this experiment, the event-related potential, a neuroscientific measure, was used to study the neural correlates of repeating graphics within graded orderliness.

More efficient formation of longer-term representations for word forms at birth can be linked to better language skills at 2 years.

Infants are able to extract words from speech early in life. Here we show that the quality of forming longer-term representations for word forms at birth predicts expressive language ability at the age of two years. Seventy-five neonates were familiarized with two spoken disyllabic pseudowords.

Association of lifetime major depressive disorder with enhanced attentional sensitivity measured with P3 response in young adult twins.

Major depression is associated with alterations in the auditory P3 event-related potential (ERP). However, the persistence of these abnormalities after recovery from depressive episodes, especially in young adults, is not well known. Furthermore, the potential influence of substance use on this association is poorly understood.

Infancy and early childhood maturation of neural auditory change detection and its associations to familial dyslexia risk.

Objective: We investigated early maturation of the infant mismatch response MMR, including mismatch negativity (MMN), positive MMR (P-MMR), and late discriminative negativity (LDN), indexing auditory discrimination abilities, and the influence of familial developmental dyslexia risk.

Methods: We recorded MMRs to vowel, duration, and frequency deviants in pseudo-words at 0, 6, and 28 months and compared MMRs in subgroups with vs. without dyslexia risk, in a sample over-represented by risk infants.

Inattention and Uncertainty in the Predictive Brain.

Negative effects of inattention on task performance can be seen in many contexts of society and human behavior, such as traffic, work, and sports. In traffic, inattention is one of the most frequently cited causal factors in accidents. In order to identify inattention and mitigate its negative effects, there is a need for quantifying attentional demands of dynamic tasks, with a credible basis in cognitive modeling and neuroscience.

Mindsets and Neural Mechanisms of Automatic Reactions to Negative Feedback in Mathematics in Elementary School Students.

Neuroscientific research regarding mindsets is so far scarce, especially among children. Moreover, even though research indicates the importance of domain specificity of mindsets, this has not yet been investigated in neuroscientific studies regarding implicit beliefs. The purpose of this study was to examine general intelligence and math ability mindsets and their relations to automatic reactions to negative feedback in mathematics in the Finnish elementary school context.

Structural white matter connectometry of reading and dyslexia.

Current views on the neural network subserving reading and its deficits in dyslexia rely largely on evidence derived from functional neuroimaging studies. However, understanding the structural organization of reading and its aberrations in dyslexia requires a hodological approach, studies of which have not provided consistent findings. Here, we adopted a whole brain hodological approach and investigated relationships between structural white matter connectivity and reading skills and phonological processing in a cross-sectional study of 44 adults using individual local connectome matrix from diffusion MRI data.

Voxel and surface based whole brain analysis shows reading skill associated grey matter abnormalities in dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is the most prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder with a substantial negative influence on the individual's academic achievement and career. Research on its neuroanatomical origins has continued for half a century, yielding, however, inconsistent results, lowered total brain volume being the most consistent finding. We set out to evaluate the grey matter (GM) volume and cortical abnormalities in adult dyslexic individuals, employing a combination of whole-brain voxel- and surface-based morphometry following current recommendations on analysis approaches, coupled with rigorous neuropsychological testing.

A Review of Occlusion as a Tool to Assess Attentional Demand in Driving.

Objective: The aim of this review is to identify how visual occlusion contributes to our understanding of attentional demand and spare visual capacity in driving and the strengths and limitations of the method.

Background: The occlusion technique was developed by John W. Senders to evaluate the attentional demand of driving.

A touchstone of Finnish curriculum thought and core curriculum for basic education: Reviewing the current situation and imagining the future.

Pandemics, like other global challenges, are unquestionably curricular issues. They are curriculum issues not only because of the disrupting consequences of Covid-19 and the economic and social crisis alike but also because people have, through their own activities, contributed to global catastrophes and perpetuated injustices. This article attempts to answer the question: How does Finnish curricular thought, including the role of the teacher and the core curriculum for basic education, respond to the various global crises? While reviewing the current situation, the article also imagines a post-Covid-19 curriculum.

Impaired Perception and Neural Processing of Rules in Developmental Dyslexia.

Rules and regularities of language are typically processed in an implicit and effortless way in the human brain. Individuals with developmental dyslexia have problems in implicit learning of regularities in sequential stimuli, but the neural basis of this deficit has not been studied. This study investigated extraction and utilization of a complex auditory rule at neural and perceptual levels in 18 adults with dyslexia and 20 typical readers.

Aging and non-native speech perception: A phonetic training study.

Cognitive decline is evident in the elderly and it affects speech perception and foreign language learning. A listen-and-repeat training with a challenging speech sound contrast was earlier found to be effective in young monolingual adults and even in advanced L2 university students at the attentive and pre-attentive levels. This study investigates foreign language speech perception in the elderly with the same protocol used with the young adults.

Infant event-related potentials to speech are associated with prelinguistic development.

Neural auditory processing and prelinguistic communication build the foundation for later language development, but how these two are associated is not well known. The current study investigated how neural speech processing is associated with the level and development of prelinguistic skills in 102 infants. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in 6-months-olds to assess the neural detection of a pseudoword (obligatory responses), as well as the neural discrimination of changes in the pseudoword (mismatch responses, MMRs).

Neuromagnetic speech discrimination responses are associated with reading-related skills in dyslexic and typical readers.

Poor neural speech discrimination has been connected to dyslexia, and may represent phonological processing deficits that are hypothesized to be the main cause for reading impairments. Thus far, neural speech discrimination impairments have rarely been investigated in adult dyslexics, and even less by examining sources of neuromagnetic responses. We compared neuromagnetic speech discrimination in dyslexic and typical readers with mismatch fields (MMF) and determined the associations between MMFs and reading-related skills.

Expert Drivers' Prospective Thinking-Aloud to Enhance Automated Driving Technologies - Investigating Uncertainty and Anticipation in Traffic.

Current automated driving technology cannot cope in numerous conditions that are basic daily driving situations for human drivers. Previous studies show that profound understanding of human drivers' capability to interpret and anticipate traffic situations is required in order to provide similar capacities for automated driving technologies. There is currently not enough a priori understanding of these anticipatory capacities for safe driving applicable to any given driving situation.