The principles and practices of educational neuroscience: Comment on Bowers (2016).

In his recent critique of Educational Neuroscience, Bowers argues that neuroscience has no role to play in informing education, which he equates with classroom teaching. Neuroscience, he suggests, adds nothing to what we can learn from psychology. In this commentary, we argue that Bowers' assertions misrepresent the nature and aims of the work in this new field.

Do more intelligent brains retain heightened plasticity for longer in development? A computational investigation.

Twin studies indicate that the heritability of general cognitive ability - the genetic contribution to individual differences - increases with age. Brant et al. (2013) reported that this increase in heritability occurs earlier in development for low ability children than high ability children.

Management of Colorectal Anastomotic Leak.

The aim of this article is to present strategies for preventing and managing the failure of the surgical restoration of intestinal continuity. Despite improvements in surgical technique and perioperative care, anastomotic leaks still occur, and with them occur increased morbidity, mortality, length of stay, and costs. Due to the devastating consequences for patients with failed anastomoses, there have been a myriad of materials and techniques used by surgeons to create better intestinal anastomoses.

Current State of Colorectal Surgery Training: A Survey of Program Directors, Current and Recently Matched Colorectal Residents, and Recent Colorectal Graduates.

Background: Colorectal residency has become one of the more competitive postgraduate training opportunities; however, little information is available to guide potential applicants in gauging their competitiveness.

Objective: The aim of this study was to identify the current trends colorectal residency training and to identify what factors are considered most important in ranking a candidate highly. We hypothesized that there was a difference in what program directors, current and recently matched colorectal residents, and recent graduates consider most important in making a candidate competitive for a colorectal residency position.

Bilingual children show an advantage in controlling verbal interference during spoken language comprehension.

Studies measuring inhibitory control in the visual modality have shown a bilingual advantage in both children and adults. However, there is a lack of developmental research on inhibitory control in the auditory modality. This study compared the comprehension of active and passive English sentences in 7-10 years old bilingual and monolingual children.

Multiscale Modeling of Gene-Behavior Associations in an Artificial Neural Network Model of Cognitive Development.

In the multidisciplinary field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, statistical associations between levels of description play an increasingly important role. One example of such associations is the observation of correlations between relatively common gene variants and individual differences in behavior. It is perhaps surprising that such associations can be detected despite the remoteness of these levels of description, and the fact that behavior is the outcome of an extended developmental process involving interaction of the whole organism with a variable environment.

The over-pruning hypothesis of autism.

This article outlines the over-pruning hypothesis of autism. The hypothesis originates in a neurocomputational model of the regressive sub-type (Thomas, Knowland & Karmiloff-Smith, 2011a, 2011b). Here we develop a more general version of the over-pruning hypothesis to address heterogeneity in the timing of manifestation of ASD, including new computer simulations which reconcile the different observed developmental trajectories (early onset, late onset, regression) via a single underlying atypical mechanism; and which show how unaffected siblings of individuals with ASD may differ from controls either by inheriting a milder version of the pathological mechanism or by co-inheriting the risk factors without the pathological mechanism.

Environmental and Genetic Influences on Neurocognitive Development: The Importance of Multiple Methodologies and Time-Dependent Intervention.

Genetic mutations and environmental factors dynamically influence gene expression and developmental trajectories at the neural, cognitive, and behavioral levels. The examples in this article cover different periods of neurocognitive development-early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood-and focus on studies in which researchers have used a variety of methodologies to illustrate the early effects of socioeconomic status and stress on brain function, as well as how allelic differences explain why some individuals respond to intervention and others do not. These studies highlight how similar behaviors can be driven by different underlying neural processes and show how a neurocomputational model of early development can account for neurodevelopmental syndromes, such as autism spectrum disorders, with novel implications for intervention.

Handedness as a marker of cerebral lateralization in children with and without autism.

We employed a multiple case studies approach to investigate lateralization of hand actions in typically and atypically developing children between 4 and 5 years of age. We report on a detailed set of over 1200 hand actions made by four typically developing boys and four boys with autism. Participants were assessed for unimanual hand actions to both objects and the self (self-directed behaviors).

Audio-visual speech perception: a developmental ERP investigation.

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language learning.

Modeling mechanisms of persisting and resolving delay in language development.

PURPOSE In this study, the authors used neural network modeling to investigate the possible mechanistic basis of developmental language delay and to test the viability of the hypothesis that persisting delay and resolving delay lie on a mechanistic continuum with normal development. METHOD The authors used a population modeling approach to study individual rates of development in 1,000 simulated individuals acquiring a notional language domain (in this study, represented by English past tense). Variation was caused by differences in internal neurocomputational learning parameters as well as the richness of the language environment.

Effect of long acting insulin supplementation on diabetic nephropathy in Wistar rats.

This study was designed to check whether insulin supplementation is crucial for inducing diabetic nephropathy (DNP) in Wistar rats. Diabetes was induced by a single intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin. The urinary biochemical parameters such as albumin, creatinine and urea nitrogen were monitored every two weeks.

Modeling socioeconomic status effects on language development.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important environmental predictor of language and cognitive development, but the causal pathways by which it operates are unclear. We used a computational model of development to explore the adequacy of manipulations of environmental information to simulate SES effects in English past-tense acquisition, in a data set provided by Bishop (2005). To our knowledge, this is the first application of computational models of development to SES.

Bilateral anterior thoracotomy (clamshell incision) is the ideal emergency thoracotomy incision: an anatomic study.

Background: Emergency thoracotomy (ET) is a procedure that provides rapid access to intrathoracic structures for thoracic trauma patients arriving at the hospital in extremis. This study assesses the accessibility of intrathoracic structures provided by six different ET incisions. We hypothesize that the bilateral anterior thoracotomy ("clamshell" incision) provides the most rapid and definitive accessibility to intrathoracic structures.

Human handedness: an inherited evolutionary trait.

Our objective was to demonstrate that human population-level, right-handedness, is not species specific, precipitated from language areas in the brain, but rather is context specific and inherited from a behavior common to both humans and great apes. In general, previous methods of assessing human handedness have neglected to consider the context of action, or employ methods suitable for direct comparison across species. We employed a bottom-up, context-sensitive method to quantitatively assess manual actions in right-handed, typically developing children during naturalistic behavior.

Are imaging and lesioning convergent methods for assessing functional specialisation?: investigations using an artificial neural network.

This article presents an investigation of the relationship between lesioning and neuroimaging methods of assessing functional specialisation, using synthetic brain imaging (SBI) and lesioning of a connectionist network of past-tense formation. The model comprised two processing 'routes': one was a direct route between layers of input and output units, while the other, indirect, route featured an intermediate layer of processing units. Emergent specialisation within the network was assessed (1) by lesioning either the direct or indirect route and measuring past-tense performance for regular and irregular verbs, and (2) by measuring functional activation in each route when processing each verb type (SBI).

Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain.

Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a standardized measure of human intellectual capacity that takes into account a wide range of cognitive skills. IQ is generally considered to be stable across the lifespan, with scores at one time point used to predict educational achievement and employment prospects in later years. Neuroimaging allows us to test whether unexpected longitudinal fluctuations in measured IQ are related to brain development.

Mechanisms of developmental regression in autism and the broader phenotype: a neural network modeling approach.

Loss of previously established behaviors in early childhood constitutes a markedly atypical developmental trajectory. It is found almost uniquely in autism and its cause is currently unknown (Baird et al., 2008).

The right posterior paravermis and the control of language interference.

Auditory and written language in humans' comprehension necessitates attention to the message of interest and suppression of interference from distracting sources. Investigating the brain areas associated with the control of interference is challenging because it is inevitable that activation of the brain regions that control interference co-occurs with activation related to interference per se. To isolate the mechanisms that control verbal interference, we used a combination of structural and functional imaging techniques in Italian and German participants who spoke English as a second language.

Multiple routes from occipital to temporal cortices during reading.

Contemporary models of the neural system that supports reading propose that activity in a ventral occipitotemporal area (vOT) drives activity in higher-order language areas, for example, those in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS). We used fMRI with dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to investigate evidence for other routes from visual cortex to the left temporal lobe language areas. First we identified activations in posterior inferior occipital (iO) and vOT areas that were more activated for silent reading than listening to words and sentences; and in pSTS and aSTS areas that were commonly activated for reading relative to false-fonts and listening to words relative to reversed words.

Definitions versus categorization: assessing the development of lexico-semantic knowledge in Williams syndrome.

Background: Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with relatively strong language abilities despite mild to moderate intellectual disability, particularly when language is indexed by vocabulary.

Aims: The aim of the study was twofold: (1) to investigate whether reported lexical anomalies in WS can be explained with reference to anomalous semantic development; and (2) to assess whether receptive vocabulary skills in WS, a relative strength, are underpinned by commensurate semantic knowledge.

Methods & Procedures: The development of lexical-semantic knowledge was investigated in 45 typically developing individuals (chronological age range = 5-10 years, mental age range = 5-13 years) and 15 individuals with WS (chronological age range = 12-50 years, mental age range = 4-17 years) by means of (1) a categorization task and (2) a definitions task, which was expected to make additional metacognitive demands.

Development of motion processing in children with autism.

Recent findings suggest that children with autism may be impaired in the perception of biological motion from moving point-light displays. Some children with autism also have abnormally high motion coherence thresholds. In the current study we tested a group of children with autism and a group of typically developing children aged 5 to 12 years of age on several motion perception tasks, in order to establish the specificity of the biological motion deficit in relation to other visual discrimination skills.

The development of metaphorical language comprehension in typical development and in Williams syndrome.

The domain of figurative language comprehension was used to probe the developmental relation between language and cognition in typically developing individuals and individuals with Williams syndrome. Extending the work of Vosniadou and Ortony, the emergence of nonliteral similarity and category knowledge was investigated in 117 typically developing children between 4 and 12 years of age, 19 typically developing adults, 15 children with Williams syndrome between 5 and 12 years of age, and 8 adults with Williams syndrome. Participants were required to complete similarity and categorization statements by selecting one of two words (e.