BACKGROUND Schizophrenia patients have difficulty mastering even rote procedural tasks in rehabilitation settings. Although most studies demonstrate intact procedural learning in schizophrenia, recent findings demonstrate that a critical component of procedural learning is dependent on sleep. This study tested the hypothesis that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit in sleep-dependent pro...

One important factor in the failure to learn arithmetic in the normal way is an endogenous core deficit in the sense of number. This has been associated with low numeracy in general (e.g. Halberda et al. in Nature 455:665–668, 2008) and with dyscalculia more specifically (e.g. Landerl et al. in Cognition 93:99–125, 2004). Here, we describe straightforward ways of identifying this deficit, and o...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by spatial memory dysfunction, but the selectivity of the deficit remains unclear. We addressed this issue by comparing performance on spatial and object variants of a conditional associative learning task, and by analysing the data with time series analytical techniques. The 11 PD subjects and 15 normal control subjects learned stimulus-stimulus pairin...

Learning difficulties, including problems with numeracy, are common in Western populations. Many children with learning difficulty are survivors of preterm birth. Although some of these children have neurological disabilities, many are neurologically normal, and the latter group provides us with an important opportunity to investigate the neural bases of learning problems. We have conducted a n...

Impairments in statistical learning might be a common deficit among individuals with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Using meta-analysis, we examined statistical learning in SLI (14 studies, 15 comparisons) and ASD (13 studies, 20 comparisons) to evaluate this hypothesis. Effect sizes were examined as a function of diagnosis across multiple statistical lea...

BACKGROUND Psychopathy (PP) is associated with a performance deficit in a variety of stimulus-response and stimulus-reinforcement learning paradigms. We tested the hypothesis that failures in error monitoring underlie these learning deficits. METHOD We measured electrophysiological correlates of error monitoring [error-related negativity (ERN)] during a probabilistic learning task in individu...

OBJECTIVE There are multiple possible etiologies for learning difficulties in children. There is growing evidence that many students identified as having learning difficulties have significant working memory deficits. To determine, in a sample of primary school students in Jakarta, Indonesia, the prevalence of learning difficulties and learning difficulties co-morbid with working memory deficit...

Learning Objectives: After studying this article, the participant should be able to: 1. Understand the mechanism of speech production. 2. Recognize the specific cause of a speech abnormality (structural deficit, neurogenic deficit, misarticulation, or mechanical interference). 3. Perform a thorough clinical assessment using an intraoral examination and speech production analysis. 4. Understand ...

Child-directed cues support imitation of novel actions at 18 months, but not at two years of age. The current studies explore the mechanisms that underlie the propensity that children have to copy others at 18 months, and how the value of child-directed communication changes over development. We ask if attentional allocation accounts for children's failure to imitate observed actions at 18 mont...

Attention plays a fundamental role in visual learning and memory. One highly established principle of visual attention is that the harder a central task is, the more attentional resources are used to perform the task and the smaller amount of attention is allocated to peripheral processing because of limited attention capacity. Here we show that this principle holds true in a dual-task setting ...