Background: In a companion article [1], we described the development and evaluation of software designed to remediate dyscalculia. This software is based on the hypothesis that dyscalculia is due to a "core deficit" in number sense or in its access via symbolic information. Here we review the evidence for this hypothesis, and present results from an initial open-trial test of the software in a ...

Background: Unremitting fatigue and unrefreshing sleep, hallmark traits of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), are also pathognomonic of sleep disorders. Yet, no reproducible perturbations of sleep architecture, multiple sleep latency times or Epworth Sleepiness Scores are found to be associated consistently with CFS. This led us to hypothesize that sleep homeostasis, rather than sleep architecture...

Background: Many studies have reported beneficial effects from the application of near-infrared (NIR) light photobiomodulation (PBM) to the body, and one group has reported beneficial effects applying it to the brain in stroke patients. We have reported that the measurement of a patient's left and right hemispheric emotional valence (HEV) may clarify data and guide lateralized treatments. We so...

Background Children with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), such as children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), often show auditory processing deficits related to their overarching language impairment. Auditory training programs such as Fast ForWord Language may potentially alleviate these deficits through training-induced improvements in auditory processing. Methods To assess the impa...

BACKGROUND According to the traditional two-stage model of face processing, the facespecific N170 event-related potential (ERP) is linked to structural encoding of face stimuli, whereas later ERP components are thought to reflect processing of facial affect. This view has recently been challenged by reports of N170 modulations by emotional facial expression. This study examines the time-course ...

Objective: To study the neurocognitive profile and its relationship to prefrontal dysfunction in non-demented Parkinson's disease (PD) with deficient haptic perception. Methods: Twelve right-handed patients with PD and 12 healthy control subjects underwent thorough neuropsychological testing including Rey complex figure, Rey auditory verbal and figural learning test, figural and verbal fluency,...

Substantial evidence suggests that the phasic activities of dopaminergic neurons in the primate midbrain represent a temporal difference (TD) error in predictions of future reward, with increases above and decreases below baseline consequent on positive and negative prediction errors, respectively. However, dopamine cells have very low baseline activity, which implies that the representation of...

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Background: Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), posterior parietal cortex, and regions in the occipital cortex have been identified as neural sites for visual working memory (WM). The exact involvement of the DLPFC in verbal and non-verbal working memory processes, and how these processes depend on the time-span for retention, remains disputed. Methods: We used functional MRI to explore the...

Background: Numerous previous experiments have used oddball paradigm to study change detection. This paradigm is applied here to study change detection of facial expressions in a context which demands abstraction of the emotional expression-related facial features among other changing facial features. Methods: Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in adult humans engaged in a demanding ...