Clinical studies have suggested that estrogens may affect the symptoms of schizophrenia. The novel object recognition task (NORT) in female rats treated with sub-chronic phencyclidine (PCP) was used as an animal model of the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. The current studies investigated whether chronic estradiol (E) could alleviate sub-chronic PCP-induced ...

Two word-trained dogs were presented with acts of reference in which a human pointed, named objects, or simultaneously did both. The question was whether these dogs would assume co-reference of pointing and naming and thus pick the pointed-to object. Results show that the dogs did indeed assume co-reference of pointing ...

Finn and Roediger (Psychological Science 22:781-786, 2011) found that when a negative emotional picture was presented immediately after a successful retrieval, later test performance was enhanced as compared to when a neutral picture or a blank screen had been shown. This finding implicates the period immediately following retrieval as playing ...

Recent dog-infant comparisons have indicated that the experimenter's communicative signals in object hide-and-search tasks increase the probability of perseverative (A-not-B) errors in both species (Topál et al. 2009). These behaviourally similar results, however, might reflect different mechanisms in dogs and in children. Similar errors may occur if the motor response ...

Purpose. Clinical studies indicate that up to 70% of cancer patients who receive chemotherapy experience cognitive impairment. The present study utilized a prospective longitudinal design to assess short- and long-term effects of commonly used anti-cancer drugs on cognitive performance in a mouse model. Experimental Design. Normal mice received three weekly ...

Affect misattribution occurs when affective cues color subsequent unrelated evaluations. Research suggests that affect misattribution decreases when one is aware that affective cues are unrelated to the evaluation at hand. We propose that affect misattribution may even occur when one is aware that affective cues are irrelevant, as long as ...

Current treatment of Alzheimer's disease rests on cholinergic and anti-glutamatergic substances. It has been suggested that acetylcholine is required for memory acquisition but is less important for memory retrieval. It was our goal to investigate the effects of treatment with donepezil, memantine, and a combination thereof on spatial memory. We ...

Measures of intelligence, when broadcast, serve as salient signals of social status, which may be used to unjustly reinforce low-status stereotypes about out-groups' cultural norms. Herein, we investigate neurobehavioural signals manifest in small (n = 5) groups using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a 'ranked group IQ task' where implicit ...

A fundamental advance in our understanding of human language would come from a detailed account of how non-linguistic and linguistic manual actions are differentiated in real time by language users. To explore this issue, we targeted the N400, an ERP component known to be sensitive to semantic context. Deaf signers ...

TS school starters had enhanced receptive and expressive language on standardised assessment (CELF-P) and enhanced rhyme judgements, spoonerisms, and lexical decision, indicating enhanced phonological skills and word representations. There was marginal but consistent advantage across lexico-semantic tasks. On executive tasks, speeded naming of numbers was impaired but not pictures. Young ...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) brain is marked by severe neuronal death which has been partly attributed to increased oxidative stress. The pathophysiology accounting for this free radical injury is not well-delineated at this point, but one hypothesis is that a derangement in transition metal metabolism contributes to the process. We tested ...

How do words affect generalization, and how do these effects change during development? One theory posits that even early in development, linguistic labels function as category markers and thus are different from the features of the stimuli they represent. Another theory holds that early in development, labels are akin to ...

Navigating toward (or away from) a remote odor source is a challenging problem that requires integrating olfactory information with visual and mechanosensory cues. Drosophila melanogaster is a useful organism for studying the neural mechanisms of these navigation behaviors. There are a wealth of genetic tools in this organism, as well ...

Meaningfulness and integrative processing of expressive writing may influence the effect of expressive writing. Participants completed measures of positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction before and after an expressive writing intervention. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four expressive writing instruction conditions, which combined higher and lower levels ...

Syntax use by non-human animals remains a controversial issue. We present here evidence that a dog may respond to verbal requests composed of two independent terms, one referring to an object and the other to an action to be performed relative to the object. A female mongrel dog, Sofia, was ...

Dogs appear to be sensitive to human ostensive communicative cues in a variety of situations, however there is still a measure of controversy as to the way in which these cues influence human-dog interactions. There is evidence for instance that dogs can be led into making evaluation errors in a ...

Because of dogs' prolonged evolution with humans, many of the canine cognitive skills are thought to represent a selection of traits that make dogs particularly sensitive to human cues. But how does the dog mind actually work? To develop a methodology to answer this question, we trained two dogs to ...

The study of attention has largely been about how to select among the various sensory events but also involves the selection among conflicting actions. Prior to the late 1980s, locating bottlenecks between sensory input and response dominated these studies, a different view was that attentional limits involved the importance of ...

The Bcl-2 gene is a major regulator of neural plasticity and cellular resilience. A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the Bcl-2 gene, Bcl-2 rs956572, significantly modulates the expression of Bcl-2 protein and cellular vulnerability to apoptosis. This study investigated the association between the Bcl-2 rs956572 SNP and brain structural abnormalities in ...

ABSTRACTRecent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such non-adult-like interpretations. The present ...

Brain structural and functional development, throughout childhood and into adulthood, underlies the maturation of increasingly sophisticated cognitive abilities. High-level attentional and cognitive control processes rely on the integrity of, and dynamic interactions between, core neurocognitive networks. The right fronto-insular cortex (rFIC) is a critical component of a salience network (SN) ...

BACKGROUND: Selective attention to negative information has been strongly implicated in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and offered as a potential intermediate phenotype for anxiety disorders. Attention biases have been studied in relation to a polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) offering equivocal findings. ...

The production and comprehension of human language is thought to involve a network of frontal, parietal, and temporal cortical loci interconnected by two dominant white matter pathways. These two white matter bundles, often referred to as the dorsal and ventral processing tracts, are hypothesized to have markedly different language functions. ...

Unlike the universal genetic code and ordered protein folding, direct application of Tlusty's method to the glycome produces a reducto ad absurdum: From the beginning a complicated system of chemical cognition is needed so that external information constrains and tunes what would otherwise be a monstrously large 'glycan code error ...

During conversation, interactants draw on their shared communicative context and history ("common ground") to help decide what to say next, tailoring utterances based on their knowledge of what the listener knows. The use of common ground draws on an understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others to create and ...

Many secreted proteins are synthesized as precursors with propeptides that must be cleaved to yield the mature functional form of the molecule. In addition, various growth factors occur in extracellular latent complexes with protein antagonists and are activated upon cleavage of such antagonists. Research in the separate fields of embryonic ...

The adjustment of behavior to changing goals and environmental constraints requires the flexible switching between different task sets. Cognitive flexibility is an endophenotype of executive functioning and is highly heritable, as indicated by twin studies. Individual differences in global flexibility as assessed by reaction-time measurement in a task-switching paradigm were ...

Individuals differ in their style of processing emotions (e.g., experiencing affects intensely or being alexithymic) and their strategy of regulating emotions (e.g., expressing or reappraising). A match-mismatch model of emotion processing styles and emotion regulation strategies is proposed and tested. This model specifies that for people high on affect intensity, ...

Language impairments are a characteristic feature of autism and related autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Autism is also highly heritable and one of the most promising candidate genes implicated in its pathogenesis is contactin-associated protein-like 2 (CNTNAP2), a gene also associated with language impairment. In the current study we investigated the ...

The short timescale of massive secular IQ gains ("Flynn Effect") is inconsistent with positive selection of a recent gene mutation, but other genetic mechanisms are possible. Principles of evolutionary psychology, combined with secular trends, suggest an epigenetic explanation: the Cognitive Genome Optimization Hypothesis. Per life-history theory, favorable secular trends may ...

It is unclear what neural processes induce individual differences in perceptual organization in different modalities. To examine this issue, the present study used different forms of bistable perception: auditory streaming, verbal transformations, visual plaids, and reversible figures. We performed factor analyses on the number of perceptual switches in the tasks. ...

This study examined the development of uncertainty monitoring in early childhood. Specifically, this study tested the prediction that preschoolers can reflect on their sense of certainty about the likely accuracy of their decisions, and it examined whether this ability differs across domains. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 74) completed a perceptual ...

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction being similarity based. If this is the ...

This review describes a case of convergence in the evolution of brain and cognition. Both mammals and birds can organize their behavior flexibly over time and evolved similar cognitive skills. The avian forebrain displays no lamination that corresponds to the mammalian neocortex; hence, lamination does not seem to be a ...

Fronto-striatal loops play an important role action selection processes, especially when discordant sensory and contextual information has to be integrated to allow adequate selection of actions. Neurodegeneration weakens neural inter-connectivity, which compromises the precision of neural synchronization processes. Yet, it is widely unknown how far changes in the precision of ...

Psychological research increasingly indicates that emotional processes interact with other aspects of cognition. Studies have demonstrated both the ability of emotional stimuli to influence a broad range of cognitive operations, and the ability of humans to use top-down cognitive control mechanisms to regulate emotional responses. Portions of the prefrontal cortex ...

Speakers often include extra information when producing referring expressions, which is inconsistent with the Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). In this study, we investigated how comprehension is affected by unnecessary information. The literature is mixed: some studies have found that extra information facilitates comprehension and others reported impairments. We used ...

AKT1 controls important processes in medial temporal lobe (MTL) development and plasticity, but the impact of human genetic variation in AKT1 on these processes is not known in healthy or disease states. Here, we report that an AKT1 variant (rs1130233) previously associated with AKT1 protein expression, prefrontal function and schizophrenia, ...

We describe two siblings with 3-methylglutaconic aciduria type I with phenotypic heterogeneity. The index case was a 14-year-old female with learning disability, attention deficit-hyperactivity and early onset subclinical leukoencephalopathy. Her 9-year-old brother had severe expressive speech delay and delay in speech sound development with normal cognitive functions. The diagnosis was ...

The dopaminergic system is known to modulate decision-making. As N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors strongly influence dopaminergic function, it is conceivable that the glutamatergic system is also involved in decision-making. We examined whether polymorphisms in the N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor 2B subunit gene (GRIN2B) influence decision-making using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). In total, ...

The phonetic symbols used by speech-language pathologists to transcribe speech contain underlying hexadecimal values used by computers to correctly display and process transcription data. This study aimed to develop a procedure to utilise these values as the basis for subsequent computerised analysis of cleft palate speech. A computer keyboard file ...

Spoken verb tense use in three groups of Spanish speakers with expressive limitations, namely, children with specific language impairment, bilingual children with first language (L1) (Spanish) attrition and adults with agrammatism, was compared in order to examine the possible impact of conversational tense frequency on expressive production. Based on the ...

Fragile X syndrome (FXS), caused by loss of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) product (FMRP), is the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorders. FXS patients suffer multiple behavioral symptoms, including hyperactivity, disrupted circadian cycles, and learning and memory deficits. Recently, a study in ...

Influential functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based models have involved a dorsal frontoparietal network in the orienting of both endogenous and exogenous attention, and a ventral system in attentional reorienting to task-relevant events. Nonetheless, given the low temporal resolution and susceptibility to epiphenomenal activations of fMRI, such depictions remain highly debated. ...

Proceeding from the assumptions that specific frontal regions control discrete functions and that very basic cognitive processes can be systematically manipulated to reveal those functions, recent reports have demonstrated consistent anatomical/functional relationships: dorsomedial for energization, left dorsolateral for task setting, and right dorsolateral for monitoring. There is no central executive. ...

The neural processes that underlie executive function begin to develop in infancy. However, it is unclear how the behavior manifested by these processes are related or if they can be differentiated early in development. This study seeks to examine early emerging executive functioning skills in monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) by using ...

The purpose of the present study was to compare the mechanisms of fatigue induced by a unilateral vs a bilateral submaximal isometric knee extension. Ten physically active men completed two experimental sessions, randomly presented. They were asked to maintain an isometric knee extension force corresponding to 20% of the maximal ...

At work and in our personal life we often need to remember to perform intended actions at some point in the future, referred to as Prospective Memory. Individuals sometimes forget to perform intentions in safety-critical work contexts. Holding intentions can also interfere with ongoing tasks. We applied theories and methods ...

Cultures are built on social exchange. Most languages have dedicated grammatical machinery for expressing this. To demonstrate that statistical methods can also be applied to grammatical meaning, we here ask whether the underlying meanings of these grammatical constructions are based on shared common concepts. To explore this, we designed video ...

Every descriptive language is not only metaphoric and interpretative, but it is also developed (or adopted) ad hoc to fulfill a certain agenda.