Infants preferentially discriminate between speech tokens that cross native category boundaries prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for unsupervised distributional learning strategies in phoneme acquisition in the first year of life. Multiple sources of between-speaker variability contribute to children's language input and thus complicate the problem of distr...

The visual system uses information about the relative depth of contours and surfaces to link and segment elements of visual scenes. The integration of form and depth information was studied in areas V1 and V2 of the alert macaque. Neurons in area V2 used contextual depth information to integrate occluded contours, signal the presence of object boundaries, and segment surfaces: (1) Amodal contou...

We examined reciprocal associations between early maternal language use and children's language and cognitive development in seventy ethnically diverse, low-income families. Mother-child dyads were videotaped when children were aged 2;0 and 3;0. Video transcripts were analyzed for quantity and lexical diversity of maternal and child language. Child cognitive development was assessed at both age...

Top-down restoration mechanisms can enhance perception of degraded speech. Even in normal hearing, however, a large variability has been observed in how effectively individuals can benefit from these mechanisms. To investigate if this variability is partially caused by individuals' linguistic and cognitive skills, normal-hearing participants of varying ages were assessed for receptive vocabular...

Drosophila APC has a role in maintaining adherens junctions, and also helps to tether mitotic spindles to the cortex and to orient them in the epithelial plane. In mammalian cells, APC has been implicated in cell migration. APC also helps safeguard the fidelity of chromosome segregation in mitotic cells. Loss of APC’s various functions at the cell periphery may contribute to tumour progression....

0 K(τ)s(t− τ)dτ, (1) where s(t) is the input signal, r(t) is the output signal, and K(·) is the linear kernel of the system that can be measured by using a Dirac-δ function δ(·) or any type of white noise (not necessarily gaussian) as the input signal. We take the convolution in Eq. (1) starting from 0 instead of −∞ in order to satisfy the causality condition: the input signal in the future wil...

Many thousands of cortical neurons are activated by any single sensory stimulus, but the organization of these populations is poorly understood. For example, are neurons in mouse visual cortex--whose preferred orientations are arranged randomly--organized with respect to other response properties? Using high-speed in vivo two-photon calcium imaging, we characterized the receptive fields of up t...