Data from the Head Start Impact Study (N=3,185) were used to determine whether Head Start differentially benefited children from homes with high, middle, and low levels of parental preacademic stimulation on three academic outcome domains – early literacy, receptive vocabulary, and early math – after one year. Results from residualized growth models showed positive impacts of random assignment ...

Data from the Head Start Impact Study (N = 3,185, age = 3-4 years) were used to determine whether 1 year of Head Start differentially benefited children from homes with high, middle, and low levels of parental preacademic stimulation on three academic outcome domains-early math, early literacy, and receptive vocabulary. Results from residualized growth models showed positive impacts of random a...

PURPOSE As children develop skills in writing across academic contexts, clinicians and educators need to have a fundamental understanding of typical writing development as well as valid and reliable assessment methods. The purpose of this study was to examine the progression of linguistic elements in school-age children's narrative and expository writing development. METHOD Narrative and expo...

One-year-old infants have a small receptive vocabulary and follow deictic gestures, but it is still debated whether they appreciate the referential nature of these signals. Demonstrating understanding of the complementary roles of symbolic (word) and indexical (pointing) reference provides evidence of referential interpretation of communicative signals. We presented 13-month-old infants with vi...

Visual cortical simple cells show a strong preference for edges of a particular orientation[Hubel and Wiesel, 1962]. The receptive field of the cortical cell shows adjacent excitatory and inhibitory subfields, which are projections from ON-center and OFF-center LGN cells, respectively[Reid and Alonso, 1995]. Here we present a single cell model using ON and OFF channels, a natural scene environm...

The complex object recognition tasks are still one big problem in neurocomputing today. This paper presents a method of detecting and recognizing complex objects, in cluttered environment, in a purely feed-forward way, being able to account for ultra-rapid visual categorization. We used a retinotopic architecture of simple spiking neurons with different types of receptive fields, organized in a...

A critical task of the central nervous system is to learn causal relationships between stimuli to anticipate events in the future, such as the position of a moving prey or predator. What are the neuronal phenomena underlying anticipation? In this article, I review recent results in hippocampal electrophysiology that shed light on this issue. It is shown that hippocampal spatial receptive fields...

The central nervous system is plastic throughout life, but is most sensitive to the statistics of the sensory environment during critical periods of early postnatal development. In the auditory cortex, various forms of acoustic experience have been found to shape the formation of receptive fields and influence the overall rate of cortical organization. The synaptic mechanisms that control corti...