Turtle Origins: Picking Up Speed

Picking up patterns in language

Laura Batterink is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. She earned her BA in neuroscience from Middlebury College in 2007 and her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Oregon in 2012. Her research focuses on the contribution of implicit and explicit mechanisms to language acquisition and related forms of learning. This research has implications for understanding why ...

Who's picking up the bill?

Health behavior change: a field just picking up speed. A comment on Ogden (2016).

A central tension described in Ogden’s (2016) editorial is that between the variability (the ‘mess’) that appears inherent to human behavior – in this case in response to health-related interventions – and the determinacy science seeks. For those studying and modeling human behavior, it is hard not to be dumfounded by its ‘ill-fitting, multiple-influenced, volatile, situational and porous natur...

Picking up speed in understanding: Speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year.

To explore how online speech processing efficiency relates to vocabulary growth in the 2nd year, the authors longitudinally observed 59 English-learning children at 15, 18, 21, and 25 months as they looked at pictures while listening to speech naming one of the pictures. The time course of eye movements in response to speech revealed significant increases in the efficiency of comprehension over...

Picking Up the Trail of Phylogenetic Footprints

Non-coding sequence in eukaryotes encodes functionally important signals for the regulation of gene expression. Since these elements are evolutionary conserved among related taxa due to stabilizing selection they accumulate less mutations than adjacent non-functional DNA. These conserved non-coding sequences with potential regulatory activity, are known as phylogenetic footprints. They can be d...