I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

This study examined the role of self-regulation in emerging academic ability in one hundred and forty-one 3- to 5-year-old children from low-income homes. Measures of effortful control, false belief understanding, and the inhibitory control and attention-shifting aspects of executive function in preschool were related to measures of math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Results indicated that the various aspects of child self-regulation accounted for unique variance in the academic outcomes independent of general intelligence and that the inhibitory control aspect of executive function was a prominent correlate of both early math and reading ability. Findings suggest that curricula designed to improve self-regulation skills as well as enhance early academic abilities may be most effective in helping children succeed in school.

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Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by suboptimal decisions and actions that are associated with an increased incidence of unintentional injuries, violence, substance abuse, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for adolescent behavior have failed to account for the nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to both childhood and adulthood. This review provides a biologically plausible model of the neural mechanisms underlying these nonlinear changes in behavior. We provide evidence from recent human brain imaging and animal studies that there is a heightened responsiveness to incentives and socioemotional contexts during this time, when impulse control is still relatively immature. These findings suggest differential development of bottom-up limbic systems, implicated in incentive and emotional processing, to top-down control systems during adolescence as compared to childhood and adulthood. This developmental pattern may be exacerbated in those adolescents prone to emotional reactivity, increasing the likelihood of poor outcomes.

The Adolescent Brain

To be successful takes creativity, flexibility, self-control, and discipline. Central to all those are ‘executive functions,’ including mentally playing with ideas, giving a considered rather than an impulsive response, and staying focused. Diverse activities have been shown to improve children’s executive functions – computerized training, non-computerized games, aerobics, martial arts, yoga, mindfulness, and school curricula. Central to all these is repeated practice and constantly challenging executive functions. Children with worse executive functions initially, benefit most; thus early executive-function training may avert widening achievement gaps later. To improve executive functions, focusing narrowly on them may not be as effective as also addressing emotional and social development (as do curricula that improve executive functions) and physical development (shown by positive effects of aerobics, martial arts, and yoga).

https://www.doctorbrunner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Science-2011-science_interventions_-shown_to_aid.pdf

Interventions Shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4 to 12 Years Old

As video-game playing has become a ubiquitous activity in today's society, it is worth considering its potential consequences on perceptual and motor skills. It is well known that exposing an organism to an altered visual environment often results in modification of the visual system of the organism. The field of perceptual learning provides many examples of training-induced increases in performance. But perceptual learning, when it occurs, tends to be specific to the trained task; that is, generalization to new tasks is rarely found. Here we show, by contrast, that action-video-game playing is capable of altering a range of visual skills. Four experiments establish changes in different aspects of visual attention in habitual video-game players as compared with non-video-game players. In a fifth experiment, non-players trained on an action video game show marked improvement from their pre-training abilities, thereby establishing the role of playing in this effect.

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Action video game modifies visual selective attention

Objective Deficits in executive functioning, including working memory (WM) deficits, have been suggested to be important in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). During 2002 to 2003, the authors conducted a multicenter, randomized, controlled, double-blind trial to investigate the effect of improving WM by computerized, systematic practice of WM tasks. Method Included in the trial were 53 children with ADHD (9 girls; 15 of 53 inattentive subtype), aged 7 to 12 years, without stimulant medication. The compliance criterion (>20 days of training) was met by 44 subjects, 42 of whom were also evaluated at follow-up 3 months later. Participants were randomly assigned to use either the treatment computer program for training WM or a comparison program. The main outcome measure was the span-board task, a visuospatial WM task that was not part of the training program. Results For the span-board task, there was a significant treatment effect both post-intervention and at follow-up. In addition, there were significant effects for secondary outcome tasks measuring verbal WM, response inhibition, and complex reasoning. Parent ratings showed significant reduction in symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity, both post-intervention and at follow-up. Conclusions This study shows that WM can be improved by training in children with ADHD. This training also improved response inhibition and reasoning and resulted in a reduction of the parent-rated inattentive symptoms of ADHD.

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Computerized Training of Working Memory in Children With ADHD-A Randomized, Controlled Trial

Working memory capacity has traditionally been thought to be constant. Recent studies, however, suggest that working memory can be improved by training. In this study, we have investigated the changes in brain activity that are induced by working memory training. Two experiments were carried out in which healthy, adult human subjects practiced working memory tasks for 5 weeks. Brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before, during and after training. After training, brain activity that was related to working memory increased in the middle frontal gyrus and superior and inferior parietal cortices. The changes in cortical activity could be evidence of training-induced plasticity in the neural systems that underlie working memory.

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Increased prefrontal and parietal activity after training of working memory.

Working memory (WM) capacity is the ability to retain and manipulate information during a short period of time. This ability underlies complex reasoning and has generally been regarded as a fixed trait of the individual. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) represent one group of subjects with a WM deficit, attributed to an impairment of the frontal lobe. In the present study, we used a new training paradigm with intensive and adaptive training of WM tasks and evaluated the effect of training with a double blind, placebo controlled design. Training significantly enhanced performance on the trained WM tasks. More importantly, the training significantly improved performance on a nontrained visuo-spatial WM task and on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which is a nonverbal complex reasoning task. In addition, motor activity ‐ as measured by the number of head movements during a computerized test ‐ was significantly reduced in the treatment group. A second experiment showed that similar training-induced improvements on cognitive tasks are also possible in young adults without ADHD. These results demonstrate that performance on WM tasks can be significantly improved by training, and that the training effect also generalizes to nontrained tasks requiring WM. Training improved performance on tasks related to prefrontal functioning and had also a significant effect on motor activity in children with ADHD. The results thus suggest that WM training potentially could be of clinical use for ameliorating the symptoms in ADHD.

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Training of working memory in children with ADHD.

In the human brain, myelination of axons continues until early adulthood and is thought to be important for the development of cognitive functions during childhood. We used diffusion tensor MR imaging and calculated fractional anisotropy, an indicator of myelination and axonal thickness, in children aged between 8 and 18 years. Development of working memory capacity was positively correlated with fractional anisotropy in two regions in the left frontal lobe, including a region between the superior frontal and parietal cortices. Reading ability, on the other hand, was only correlated with fractional anisotropy in the left temporal lobe, in the same white matter region where adults with reading disability are known to have lower fractional anisotropy. Both the temporal and the frontal regions were also correlated with age. These results show that maturation of white matter is an important part of brain maturation during childhood, and that maturation of relatively restricted regions of white matter is correlated with development of specific cognitive functions.

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Maturation of White Matter is Associated with the Development of Cognitive Functions during Childhood

The aim of this study was to identify changes in brain activity associated with the increase in working memory (WM) capacity that occurs during childhood and early adulthood. Functional MRI (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity in subjects between 9 and 18 years of age while they performed a visuospatial WM task and a baseline task. During performance of the WM task, the older children showed higher activation of cortex in the superior frontal and intraparietal cortex than the younger children did. A second analysis found that WM capacity was significantly correlated with brain activity in the same regions. These frontal and parietal areas are known to be involved in the control of attention and spatial WM. The development of the functionality in these areas may play an important role in cognitive development during childhood.

http://www.klingberglab.se/pub/IncreasedBrainActivitydevVsWM.pdf?Horde=89895af65fe631068bf1c42e5475bcfb

Helena Westerberg

Papers

Computerized Training of Working Memory in Children With ADHD-A Randomized, Controlled Trial

Increased prefrontal and parietal activity after training of working memory.

Training of working memory in children with ADHD.

Maturation of White Matter is Associated with the Development of Cognitive Functions during Childhood

Increased Brain Activity in Frontal and Parietal Cortex Underlies the Development of Visuospatial Working Memory Capacity during Childhood