Mothers used wider vocabulary and talked to their six-month-old infants more during shared book reading than when they played with toys.

Aim: We compared mothers reading books to six-month-old infants or playing with toys and measured whether the maternal language input influenced the children's spoken vocabulary at 18 months of age.

Method: This Taiwanese study recruited 46 dyads and video recorded them while the mothers read books to their infants and played with them with toys at 6 months of age. The mothers' lexical diversity, which is the ratio of different unique words to the total number of words, was measured.

A sensory signature of unaffected biological parents predicts the risk of autism in their offspring.

Aim: Despite the emphasis on sensory dysfunction phenotypes in the revised diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there has been limited research, particularly in the field of neurobiology, investigating the concordance in sensory features between individuals with ASD and their genetic relatives. Therefore, our objective was to examine whether neurobehavioral sensory patterns could serve as endophenotypic markers for ASD.

Methods: We combined questionnaire- and lab-based sensory evaluations with sensory fMRI measures to examine the patterns of sensory responsivity in 30 clinically diagnosed with ASD, 26 matched controls (CON), and 48 biological parents for both groups (27 parents of individuals with ASD [P-ASD] and 21 for individuals with CON [P-CON]).

The effects of aging and perceived loneliness on lexical ambiguity resolution.

Language is central to the interactional nature of the social life within which it is situated. To react or respond in a particular situation, we must be able to recognize the social situation. Growing evidence has demonstrated the negative impact of perceived loneliness on late-life executive functions.

Neurofeedback for the Education of Children with ADHD and Specific Learning Disorders: A Review.

Neurofeedback (NF) is a type of biofeedback in which an individual's brain activity is measured and presented to them to support self-regulation of ongoing brain oscillations and achieve specific behavioral and neurophysiological outcomes. NF training induces changes in neurophysiological circuits that are associated with behavioral changes. Recent evidence suggests that the NF technique can be used to train electrical brain activity and facilitate learning among children with learning disorders.

Predictive brain signals mediate association between shared reading and expressive vocabulary in infants.

The ability to predict upcoming information is crucial for efficient language processing and enables more rapid language learning. The present study explored how shared reading experience influenced predictive brain signals and expressive vocabulary of 12-month-old infants. The predictive brain signals were measured by fNIRS responses in the occipital lobe with an unexpected visual-omission task.

Top-down sensory prediction in the infant brain at 6 months is correlated with language development at 12 and 18 months.

Previous research has suggested that top-down sensory prediction facilitates, and may be necessary for, efficient transmission of information in the brain. Here we related infants' vocabulary development to the top-down sensory prediction indexed by occipital cortex activation to the unexpected absence of a visual stimulus previously paired with an auditory stimulus. The magnitude of the neural response to the unexpected omission of a visual stimulus was assessed at the age of 6 months with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and vocabulary scores were obtained using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI) when infants reached the age of 12 months and 18 months, respectively.

Category Exemplar Production Norms for Hong Kong Cantonese: Instance Probabilities and Word Familiarity.

The lexical system of Hong Kong Cantonese has been heavily shaped by the local trilingual environment. The development of cultural- and language-specific norms for Hong Kong Cantonese is fundamental for understanding how the speaker population organize semantic memory, how they utilize their semantic resources, and what information processing strategies they use for the retrieval of semantic knowledge. This study presents a normative database of 72 lexical categories in Hong Kong Cantonese produced by native speakers in a category exemplar production task.

Static and dynamic functional connectivity supports the configuration of brain networks associated with creative cognition.

Creative cognition is recognized to involve the integration of multiple spontaneous cognitive processes and is manifested as complex networks within and between the distributed brain regions. We propose that the processing of creative cognition involves the static and dynamic re-configuration of brain networks associated with complex cognitive processes. We applied the sliding-window approach followed by a community detection algorithm and novel measures of network flexibility on the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal of 8 major functional brain networks to reveal static and dynamic alterations in the network reconfiguration during creative cognition using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Which digit is larger? Brain responses to number and size interactions in a numerical Stroop task.

When comparing the digits of different physical sizes, the processing of numerical value interacts with the processing of physical size. Given the universal use of Arabic numbers in mathematics and daily life, this study aims to elucidate the cognitive processes involved in the interactions of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features during information processing. We investigated this question by examining event-related potential (ERP) using a modified version of the size congruity comparison, which is a Stroop-like task.

Aging, cognition, and the brain: effects of age-related variation in white matter integrity on neuropsychological function.

Alterations in brain structure are viewed as neurobiological indicators which are closely tied to cognitive changes in healthy human aging. The current study used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography to investigate the relationship between age, brain variation in white matter (WM) integrity, and cognitive function. Sixteen younger adults (aged 20-28 years) and 18 healthy older adults (aged 60-75 years) underwent DTI scanning and a standardized battery of neuropsychological measures.

Neurolinguistic Studies of Reading in Chinese.

Using the Chinese writing system, which is unique with respect to the composition of each character in terms of its graphic shape, as an example, this chapter addresses the neurobiological underpinnings of reading and writing and how these brain circuits are used in different languages.

Universal brain signature of proficient reading: Evidence from four contrasting languages.

We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech-print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.

Neural correlates of merging number words.

Complex number words (e.g., "twenty two") are formed by merging together several simple number words (e.

Early MEG markers for reading Chinese phonograms: evidence from radical combinability and consistency effects.

Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have indicated that activities in the left inferior frontal cortex and left temporoparietal regions are associated with orthographic neighborhood size. To elucidate the temporal dynamics of reading-related cortical activities, we manipulated two types of neighborhood properties for Chinese phonograms, phonetic combinability and consistency. By using source analysis techniques in combination with magnetoencephalography, the results demonstrated a combinability effect in the right fusiform gyrus at ∼ 170 ms, which may reflect perceptual expertise in processing Chinese orthography.

The role of superior temporal sulcus in the control of irrelevant emotional face processing: A transcranial direct current stimulation study.

Emotional faces are often salient cues of threats or other important contexts, and may therefore have a large effect on cognitive processes of the visual environment. Indeed, many behavioral studies have demonstrated that emotional information can modulate visual attention and eye movements. The aim of the present study was to investigate (1) how irrelevant emotional face distractors affect saccadic behaviors and (2) whether such emotional effects reflect a specific neural mechanism or merely biased selective attention.

Hand proximity facilitates spatial discrimination of auditory tones.

The effect of hand proximity on vision and visual attention has been well documented. In this study we tested whether such effect(s) would also be present in the auditory modality. With hands placed either near or away from the audio sources, participants performed an auditory-spatial discrimination (Experiment 1: left or right side), pitch discrimination (Experiment 2: high, med, or low tone), and spatial-plus-pitch (Experiment 3: left or right; high, med, or low) discrimination task.

Implicit target substitution and sequencing for lexical tone production in Chinese: an FMRI study.

In this study, we examine the neural substrates underlying Tone 3 sandhi and tone sequencing in Mandarin Chinese using fMRI. Tone 3 sandhi is traditionally described as the substitution of Tone 3 with Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (i.e.

Far-space neglect in conjunction but not feature search following transcranial magnetic stimulation over right posterior parietal cortex.

Near- and far-space coding in the human brain is a dynamic process. Areas in dorsal, as well as ventral visual association cortex, including right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC), right frontal eye field (rFEF), and right ventral occipital cortex (rVO), have been shown to be important in visuospatial processing, but the involvement of these areas when the information is in near or far space remains unclear. There is a need for investigations of these representations to help explain the pathophysiology of hemispatial neglect, and the role of near and far space is crucial to this.

The dorsal attentional system in oculomotor learning of predictive information.

The dorsal attentional network is known for its role in directing top-down visual attention toward task-relevant stimuli. This goal-directed nature of the dorsal network makes it a suitable candidate for processing and extracting predictive information from the visual environment. In this review we briefly summarize some of the findings that delineate the neural substrates that contribute to predictive learning at both levels within the dorsal attentional system: including the frontal eye field (FEF) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC).

The neural development of response inhibition in 5- and 6-year-old preschoolers: an ERP and EEG study.

Many studies have used event-related potential and neural oscillations to probe the underlying neural mechanisms of inhibitory control in adults, but little has been done in typically developing preschoolers. In this study we tested healthy preschool children between the ages of 5 and 6, and observed better response inhibition in 6-year-olds compared to 5-year-olds. Importantly, this age-related difference could not be explained by the N2 component from event-related potential, but was reflected in an increase in right frontal beta power from electroencephalogram.

Open vs. closed skill sports and the modulation of inhibitory control.

Background: Inhibitory control, or the ability to suppress planned but inappropriate prepotent actions in the current environment, plays an important role in the control of human performance. Evidence from empirical studies utilizing a sport-specific design has shown that athletes have superior inhibitory control. However, less is known about whether this superiority might (1) still be seen in a general cognitive task without a sport-related context; (2) be modulated differentially by different sporting expertise (e.

Universal brain systems for recognizing word shapes and handwriting gestures during reading.

Do the neural circuits for reading vary across culture? Reading of visually complex writing systems such as Chinese has been proposed to rely on areas outside the classical left-hemisphere network for alphabetic reading. Here, however, we show that, once potential confounds in cross-cultural comparisons are controlled for by presenting handwritten stimuli to both Chinese and French readers, the underlying network for visual word recognition may be more universal than previously suspected. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a semantic task with words written in cursive font, we demonstrate that two universal circuits, a shape recognition system (reading by eye) and a gesture recognition system (reading by hand), are similarly activated and show identical patterns of activation and repetition priming in the two language groups.

Unleashing potential: transcranial direct current stimulation over the right posterior parietal cortex improves change detection in low-performing individuals.

The limits of human visual short-term memory (VSTM) have been well documented, and recent neuroscientific studies suggest that VSTM performance is associated with activity in the posterior parietal cortex. Here we show that artificially elevating parietal activity via positively charged electric current through the skull can rapidly and effortlessly improve people's VSTM performance. This artificial improvement, however, comes with an interesting twist: it interacts with people's natural VSTM capability such that low performers who tend to remember less information benefitted from the stimulation, whereas high performers did not.

Sex differences in how erotic and painful stimuli impair inhibitory control.

Witnessing emotional events such as arousal or pain may impair ongoing cognitive processes such as inhibitory control. We found that this may be true only half of the time. Erotic images and painful video clips were shown to men and women shortly before a stop signal task, which measures cognitive inhibitory control.

Investigation of bistable perception with the "silhouette spinner": sit still, spin the dancer with your will.

Many studies have used static and non-biologically related stimuli to investigate bistable perception and found that the percept is usually dominated by their intrinsic nature with some influence of voluntary control from the viewer. Here we used a dynamic stimulus of a rotating human body, the silhouette spinner illusion, to investigate how the viewers' intentions may affect their percepts. In two experiments, we manipulated observer intention (active or passive), fixation position (body or feet), and spinning velocity (fast, medium, or slow).