Distinct dynamic connectivity profiles promote enhanced conscious perception of auditory stimuli.

The neuroscience of consciousness aims to identify neural markers that distinguish brain dynamics in healthy individuals from those in unconscious conditions. Recent research has revealed that specific brain connectivity patterns correlate with conscious states and diminish with loss of consciousness. However, the contribution of these patterns to shaping conscious processing remains unclear.

Advancements in brain-computer interfaces for the rehabilitation of unilateral spatial neglect: a concise review.

This short review examines recent advancements in neurotechnologies within the context of managing unilateral spatial neglect (USN), a common condition following stroke. Despite the success of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in restoring motor function, there is a notable absence of effective BCI devices for treating cerebral visual impairments, a prevalent consequence of brain lesions that significantly hinders rehabilitation. This review analyzes current non-invasive BCIs and technological solutions dedicated to cognitive rehabilitation, with a focus on visuo-attentional disorders.

An auditory perspective on phonological development in infancy.

Introduction: The auditory system encodes the phonetic features of languages by processing spectro-temporal modulations in speech, which can be described at two time scales: relatively slow amplitude variations over time (AM, further distinguished into the slowest <8-16 Hz and faster components 16-500 Hz), and frequency modulations (FM, oscillating at higher rates about 600-10 kHz). While adults require only the slowest AM cues to identify and discriminate speech sounds, infants have been shown to also require faster AM cues (>8-16 Hz) for similar tasks.

Methods: Using an observer-based psychophysical method, this study measured the ability of typical-hearing 6-month-olds, 10-month-olds, and adults to detect a change in the vowel or consonant features of consonant-vowel syllables when temporal modulations are selectively degraded.

Melatonin in Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Critical Literature Review.

The article presents a review of the relationships between melatonin and neurodevelopmental disorders. First, the antioxidant properties of melatonin and its physiological effects are considered to understand better the role of melatonin in typical and atypical neurodevelopment. Then, several neurodevelopmental disorders occurring during infancy, such as autism spectrum disorder or neurogenetic disorders associated with autism (including Smith-Magenis syndrome, Angelman syndrome, Rett's syndrome, Tuberous sclerosis, or Williams-Beuren syndrome) and neurodevelopmental disorders occurring later in adulthood like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, are discussed with regard to impaired melatonin production and circadian rhythms, in particular, sleep-wake rhythms.

Stimulating the motor development of very premature infants: effects of early crawling training on a mini-skateboard.

Aim: To examine the effects of an early home-based 8-week crawling intervention performed by trained therapists on the motor and general development of very premature infants during the first year of life.

Methods: At term-equivalent age, immediately following discharge from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we randomly allocated 44 premature infants born before 32 weeks' gestation without major brain damage to one of three conditions in our intervention study: crawling on a mini-skateboard, the Crawliskate (Crawli), prone positioning control (Mattress), or standard care (Control). The Crawli and Mattress groups received 5 min daily at-home training administered by trained therapists for 8 consecutive weeks upon discharge from the NICU.

Natural IgG Anti-F (ab') Autoantibody Activity in Children with Autism.

Many and diverse autoimmune abnormalities have been reported in children with autism. Natural autoantibodies (NAAbs) play important immunoregulatory roles in recognition of the immune self. The objective of this study was to examine the presence of NAAbs in the sera of children with autism and across severity subgroups of autistic behavioral impairments.

[Multiphasic time: Representations, modelisation and dynamics: Putting time back in motion after traumatic violence].

A multiphasic time model, integrating the past, present and future in close interrelations, is first presented and offers a contextual approach to the perceptions and responses of an individual according to his/her personal history and environment. The present and future prospects are in continuity with the past and its consequences and effects. The past, even when it is not or no longer expressed, influences the present and the future, and this over several generations.

Aggressive behavior: A language to be understood.

Aggressive behaviors could be considered as a dynamic of communication, in which aggression is a language to be understood, to be deciphered by two protagonists : the aggressor coping with a stressful and threatening situation and the aggressed individual coping with an aggressive acting out. The following questions are addressed: (a) What does aggression mean to the aggressor, what does it mean to the aggressed individual? (b) What does the aggressor want or try to express, and why does he or she use this mode of expression and action over another? (c) How does the aggressed individual react, and what is the impact of his or her response on the aggressor? This article reviews studies on the definition of aggression, its measurement, its developmental role and its associated risk factors in children and adolescents. First, aggression in children and adolescents with typical and atypical development is examined based on a developmental approach, clinical case studies in child and adolescent psychiatry, and an empirical study on aggression in autism.

[School bullying and group violence: How to occupy a place in the group by exclusion].

The prevalence of school bullying (a deliberate, repeated act of verbal, physical or relational/social aggression occurring in a situation of inequality, including cyberbullying) is high in France (10 %) as well as in other countries like the United States (more than 40 % of school children have experienced harassment at some point in their school cursus). This frequency varies by country, source of observation, school, class, and age of children. Self-questionnaires where children have to self-identify as harassing or being harassed involve a clear bias of underevaluation (even for harassed children who can feel ashamed to report explicitly harassment).

Developmental changes in the brain response to speech during the first year of life: A near-infrared spectroscopy study of dutch-learning infants.

Language acquisition in the first year of life plays an important role in human development. Although recent research has increased our knowledge of early language development, the origins and developmental trajectories of language processing during infancy are still being debated. One important issue is whether the infant brain has already developed adult-like functional cortical specialization and lateralization for speech and language processing.

Spatial perspective-taking: insights from sensory impairments.

Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which is central to effectively understanding and interacting with our environment and other people. Sensory impairments such as blindness are known to impact spatial representations and perspective-taking is often thought of as a visual process. However, disturbed functioning of other sensory systems (e.

Predictors of cognitive, behavioural and academic difficulties in NF1.

The impact of the Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) on cognition have been subject to much clinical investigation, but environmental modifiers of disease expression have not yet been systematically investigated. The aim of this paper is to determine the role of demographic and environmental factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, parental NF1 status and neurological complications on the cognitive, behavioural and academic outcomes in NF1. Participants included 206 children aged 4-18 years seen within the Manchester clinical research NF1 service.

Attention modulates repetition effects in a context of low periodicity.

Stimulus repetition can result in a reduction in neural responses (i.e., repetition suppression) in neuroimaging studies.

Learning word order: early beginnings.

We examine the beginning of the acquisition of the relative order of function and content words, a fundamental but cross-linguistically highly variable aspect of grammar. A review of the existing empirical literature shows that infants as young as 8 months of age can distinguish between functors and content words, and have a rudimentary knowledge of the order of these two universal lexical categories in their native language. Furthermore, human adults and non-human animals such as rodents process the same linguistic information differently from infants, emphasizing the developmental relevance of bootstrapping function/content word order from surface cues available in the input.

8-month-old infants' ability to process word order is shaped by the amount of exposure.

In the majority of languages, the functional distinction between functors and content words correlates with lower-level, perceptually observable properties. Functors are generally more frequent and prosodically more minimal than content words. Previous studies demonstrate that the frequency distribution and the different acoustic realization of frequent and infrequent words guide infants in discovering their native word order.

Melatonin: From Pharmacokinetics to Clinical Use in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The role of melatonin has been extensively investigated in pathophysiological conditions, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Reduced melatonin secretion has been reported in ASD and led to many clinical trials using immediate-release and prolonged-release oral formulations of melatonin. However, melatonin's effects in ASD and the choice of formulation type require further study.

A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech.

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference.

Human Brain Ages With Hierarchy-Selective Attenuation of Prediction Errors.

From the perspective of predictive coding, our brain embodies a hierarchical generative model to realize perception, which proactively predicts the statistical structure of sensory inputs. How are these predictive processes modified as we age? Recent research suggested that aging leads to decreased weighting of sensory inputs and increased reliance on predictions. Here we investigated whether this age-related shift from sensorium to predictions occurs at all levels of hierarchical message passing.

Premigration social adversity and autism spectrum disorder.

Background: Several studies suggest significant relationships between migration and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but there are discrepant results. Given that no studies to date have included a pathological control group, the specificity of the results in ASD can be questioned.

Aims: To compare the migration experience (premigration, migratory trip, postmigration) in ASD and non-ASD pathological control groups, and study the relationships between migration and autism severity.

How 15-month-old infants process morphologically complex forms in an agglutinative language?

While phonological development is well-studied in infants, we know less about morphological development. Previous studies suggest that infants around one year of age can process words analytically (i.e.

Cognitive Impact of Cerebellar Non-invasive Stimulation in a Patient With Schizophrenia.

Cerebellum plays a role in the regulation of cognitive processes. Cerebellar alterations could explain cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. We describe the case of a 50 years old patient with schizophrenia whom underwent cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Word Frequency Is a Cue to Lexical Category for 8-Month-Old Infants.

The linguistic distinction between function words (functors) (e.g., the, he, that, on…), signaling grammatical structure, and content words (e.

Finding phrases: On the role of co-verbal facial information in learning word order in infancy.

The input contains perceptually available cues, which might allow young infants to discover abstract properties of the target language. Thus, word frequency and prosodic prominence correlate systematically with basic word order in natural languages. Prelexical infants are sensitive to these frequency-based and prosodic cues, and use them to parse new input into phrases that follow the order characteristic of their native languages.