Microbiome's Effect on White Matter in Autism.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social communication and restricted, repetitive behavioral patterns. While other physiological presentations in individuals with ASD are heterogeneous, neuroimaging studies have consistently revealed a developmental pattern of initial white matter hypermyelination followed by reduced myelination compared to typically developing peers. Multiple studies have demonstrated that core ASD symptoms, including impairments in social skills, language acquisition, learning capabilities, motor performance, and sensory processing, correlate significantly with white matter dysregulation measured through diffusion tensor imaging.

Math anxiety and arithmetic learning: Evidence for impaired procedural learning and enhanced retrieval learning.

Previous research has shown that high math anxiety (HMA) detrimentally impacts math performance; however, limited work has examined how math anxiety may impact math . The present study drew on our understanding of disparate long-term learning and memory systems to provide a framework for how HMA potentially disrupts specific types of math learning. Adult participants completed unfamiliar multiplication trials (e.

Estimating the astigmatic power of the crystalline lens and eye from ocular biometry.

Purpose: To estimate the astigmatic power of the crystalline lens and the whole eye without phakometry using a set of linear equations and to provide estimates for the astigmatic powers of the crystalline lens surfaces.

Methods: Linear optics expresses astigmatic powers in the form of matrices and uses paraxial optics and a 4 × 4 ray transfer matrix to generalise Bennett's method comprehensively to include astigmatic elements. Once this is established, the method is expanded to estimate the contributions of the front and back lens surfaces.

Declarative memory supports children's math skills: A longitudinal study.

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the neurocognitive underpinnings of learning math. Building on this work, it has been hypothesized that declarative and procedural memory, two domain-general learning and memory systems, play important roles in acquiring math skills. In a longitudinal study, we tested whether in fact declarative and procedural memory predict children's math skills during elementary school years.

Why and how to collect representative study samples in educational neuroscience research.

Background: Educational neuroscience research, which investigates the neurobiological mechanisms of learning, has historically incorporated samples drawn mostly from white, middle-class, and/or suburban populations. However, sampling in research without attending to representation can lead to biased interpretations and results that are less generalizable to an intended target population. Prior research revealing differences in neurocognitive outcomes both within- and across-groups further suggests that such practices may obscure significant effects with practical implications.

Neural specialization with generalizable representations underlies children's cognitive development of attention.

From childhood to adulthood, the human brain develops highly specialized yet interacting neural modules that give rise to nuanced attention and other cognitive functions. Each module can specialize over development to support specific functions, yet also coexist in multiple neurobiological modes to support distinct processes. Advances in cognitive neuroscience have conceptualized human attention as a set of cognitive processes anchored in highly specialized yet interacting neural systems.

Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin receptor gene is associated with child-parent neural synchrony during competition.

Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) occurs when neural electrical activity temporally aligns between individuals during social interactions. It has been used as a metric for interpersonal closeness, often during naturalistic child-parent interactions. This study evaluated whether other biological correlates of social processing predicted the prevalence of INS during child-parent interactions, and whether their observed cooperativity modulated this association.

Matrix optics of artificial intraocular pinhole apertures in astigmatic eyes: modelling depth of field.

This study uses matrix optics to develop a model to predict depth of field in eyes that may have astigmatic elements and apertures that may be elliptical in general. Depth of field is modelled as the visual acuity (VA) as a function of working distance and is illustrated graphically for model eyes that have artificial intraocular pinhole apertures. A small amount of residual myopia is an advantage to increasing the depth of field at near without interfering with distance-vision.

Mother-child synchrony is high across child executive function levels for both physical and digital spatial play.

Purpose: Play is a powerful influence on children's learning and parents can provide opportunities to learn specific content by scaffolding children's play. Parent-child synchrony (i.e.

Measurement of interpersonal physiological synchrony in dyads: A review of timing parameters used in the literature.

When individuals share interpersonal connections, such as the bond between a mother and child or between a therapist and their client, they often exhibit measurable coordination of some physiological response patterns during their interactions known as interpersonal physiological synchrony (IPS Butler, 2011; Palumbo et al., 2016; Tscacher & Meier, 2019). However, as there is no single definition of IPS in the literature, researchers across fields have not established a standardized method for its study.

Linear optics of the eye and optical systems: a review of methods and applications.

The purpose of this paper is to review the basic principles of linear optics. A paraxial optical system is represented by a symplectic matrix called the transference, with entries that represent the fundamental properties of a paraxial optical system. Such an optical system may have elements that are astigmatic and decentred or tilted.

Dioptric power and refractive behaviour: a review of methods and applications.

Myopia is a global healthcare concern and effective analyses of dioptric power are important in evaluating potential treatments involving surgery, orthokeratology, drugs such as low-dose (0.05%) atropine and gene therapy. This paper considers issues of concern when analysing refractive state such as data normality, transformations, outliers and anisometropia.

Subcortical Cognition: The Fruit Below the Rind.

Cognitive neuroscience has highlighted the cerebral cortex while often overlooking subcortical structures. This cortical proclivity is found in basic and translational research on many aspects of cognition, especially higher cognitive domains such as language, reading, music, and math. We suggest that, for both anatomical and evolutionary reasons, multiple subcortical structures play substantial roles across higher and lower cognition.

Brain preparedness: The proactive role of the cortisol awakening response in hippocampal-prefrontal functional interactions.

Upon awakening from nighttime sleep, the stress hormone cortisol in humans exhibits a robust rise within thirty to forty-five minutes. This cortisol awakening response (CAR), a crucial point of reference within the healthy cortisol circadian rhythm, has been linked to various psychological, psychiatric and health-related conditions. The CAR is thought to prepare the brain for anticipated challenges of the upcoming day to maintain one's homeostasis and promote adaptive responses.

How Closely Related Are Parent and Child Reports of Child Alexithymia?

Alexithymia is a subclinical trait involving difficulty describing and identifying emotions. It is common in a number of psychiatric conditions. Alexithymia in children is sometimes measured by parent report and sometimes by child self-report, but it is not yet known how closely related the two measures are.

How Lifestyle Factors Affect Cognitive and Executive Function and the Ability to Learn in Children.

In today's research environment, children's diet, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors are commonly studied in the context of health, independent of their effect on cognition and learning. Moreover, there is little overlap between the two literatures, although it is reasonable to expect that the lifestyle factors explored in the health-focused research are intertwined with cognition and learning processes. This thematic review provides an overview of knowledge connecting the selected lifestyle factors of diet, physical activity, and sleep hygiene to children's cognition and learning.

Vector space of generalized radii of ellipses for quantitative analysis of blur patches and other referred apertures in the astigmatic eye.

Ellipses are features of several structures in astigmatic eyes; they include retinal blur patches. How can one calculate change or averages or perform other quantitative analyses on such elliptical structures? The matrix A in the equation rAr=1, commonly used to represent an ellipse, is positive definite; such matrices do not define vector spaces. They are unsuitable, therefore, for quantitative analysis of ellipses.

Neurobiological Sex Differences in Developmental Dyslexia.

Understanding sex differences at the neurobiological level has become increasingly crucial in both basic and applied research. In the study of developmental dyslexia, early neuroimaging investigations were dominated by male-only or male-dominated samples, due at least in part to males being diagnosed more frequently. While recent studies more consistently balance the inclusion of both sexes, there has been little movement toward directly characterizing potential sex differences of the disorder.

Mechanisms of interactive specialization and emergence of functional brain circuits supporting cognitive development in children.

Cognitive development is thought to depend on the refinement and specialization of functional circuits over time, yet little is known about how this process unfolds over the course of childhood. Here we investigated growth trajectories of functional brain circuits and tested an interactive specialization model of neurocognitive development which posits that the refinement of task-related functional networks is driven by a shared history of co-activation between cortical regions. We tested this model in a longitudinal cohort of 30 children with behavioral and task-related functional brain imaging data at multiple time points spanning childhood and adolescence, focusing on the maturation of parietal circuits associated with numerical problem solving and learning.

Neural signatures of co-occurring reading and mathematical difficulties.

Impaired abilities in multiple domains is common in children with learning difficulties. Co-occurrence of low reading and mathematical abilities (LRLM) appears in almost every second child with learning difficulties. However, little is known regarding the neural bases of this combination.

Positive Attitude Toward Math Supports Early Academic Success: Behavioral Evidence and Neurocognitive Mechanisms.

Positive attitude is thought to impact academic achievement and learning in children, but little is known about its underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Using a large behavioral sample of 240 children, we found that positive attitude toward math uniquely predicted math achievement, even after we accounted for multiple other cognitive-affective factors. We then investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the link between positive attitude and academic achievement in two independent cohorts of children (discovery cohort: n = 47; replication cohort: n = 28) and tested competing hypotheses regarding the differential roles of affective-motivational and learning-memory systems.

Lens internal curvature effects on age-related eye model and lens paradox.

The gradient index (GRIN) model is the most accurate way to represent the eye lens which, because of its growth mode, is a lamellar, shell-like structure. The GRIN is thought to provide optical properties that counteract age-related changes in curvature that would otherwise create an increasingly myopic eye: the so-called lens paradox. This article investigates how fine-tuning the refractive index and the internal curvatures of the lenticular indicial contours may prevent the ageing eye from becoming myopic.

Cardinal and anti-cardinal points, equalities and chromatic dependence.

Purpose: Cardinal points are used for ray tracing through Gaussian systems. Anti-principal and anti-nodal points (which we shall refer to as the anti-cardinal points), along with the six familiar cardinal points, belong to a much larger set of special points. The purpose of this paper is to obtain a set of relationships and resulting equalities among the cardinal and anti-cardinal points and to illustrate them using Pascal's ring.