BACKGROUND Repetitive behaviours are an essential part of the diagnosis of autism but are also commonly seen in typically developing children. The current study investigated the frequency and factor structure of repetitive behaviours in a large community sample of 2-year-olds. METHODS A new measure, the Repetitive Behaviour Questionnaire (RBQ-2) was completed by 679 parents. RESULTS The RBQ...

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focussed on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically developing children in two age groups (ages of 4;11-7...

Objective: The goal of this study was to investigate relations between aspects of cognitive control and emotion in typically developing children, 7 to 9 years of age. This was investigated by examining performance on n-back working memory tasks that varied according to the level of cognitive control and emotion (e.g., faces, reward value) processing required. Relations between n-back performanc...

A grounded M -Lipschitz function on a rooted d-ary tree is an integer-valued map on the vertices that changes by at most M along edges and attains the value zero on the leaves. We study the behavior of such functions, specifically, their typical value at the root v0 of the tree. We prove that the probability that the value of a uniformly chosen random function at v0 is more than M + t is doubly...

Suppose a language L can be decided by a bounded-error randomized algorithm that runs in space S and time n · poly(S). We give a randomized algorithm for L that still runs in space O(S) and time n · poly(S) that uses only O(S) random bits; our algorithm has a low failure probability on all but a negligible fraction of inputs of each length. An immediate corollary is a deterministic algorithm fo...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to use specifically designed tasks to capture time-based, activity-based, and event-based prospective memory (PM) performance in typically developing school-age children. METHOD Two PM tasks (Fishing Game & Happy Week) were used to examine the developmental patterns of PM in these children. Retrospective memory (RM) was also examined in these tasks. A total of 120 c...

Mental flexibility is a core property of cognitive executive functions, relying on an extended frontoparietal network in the brain. fMRI research comparing typically developing children and adults has found that children from an early age recruit the same "classic" brain areas associated with mental flexibility as adults; however, there is evidence that the timing of activation may be different...

Cognitive impairment is common among children born very preterm (VPT), yet little is known about how this risk changes over time. To examine this issue, a regional cohort of 110 VPT (≤ 32 weeks gestation) and 113 full-term (FT) born children was prospectively assessed at ages 4, 6, 9, and 12 years using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised and then Wechsler Intellige...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by marked deficits in communication, social interaction, and interests. Various studies of autism have suggested abnormalities in several brain regions, with an increasing agreement on the abnormal anatomy of the white matter (WM) and on deficits in the size of the corpus callosum (CC) and its sub-regions in autism. In this paper, we aim at ...

Gene expression levels vary heritably, with approximately 25-35% of the loci affecting expression acting in cis. We characterized standing cis-regulatory variation among 16 wild-derived strains of Drosophila melanogaster. Our experiment's robust biological and technical replication enabled precise estimates of variation in allelic expression on a high-throughput SNP genotyping platform. We obse...