The ability to learn and apply rules lies at the heart of cognition. In a seminal study, Marcus et al. (1999) reported that 7-month-old infants learned abstract rules over syllable sequences and were...

Human behavior is often framed around the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate, but a ‘this or that’ dichotomy does not reflect the current research in genetics and hinders meaningful dialogue. We describe ...

Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

The expression of autism traits sufficient to meet criteria for a diagnosis can occur early (by 3 years) or later (from mid-childhood onwards). It remains unknown whether variation in age of onset i...

ABSTRACT. C.H. Waddington (1905-1975) was a British biologist and perhaps the major figure in developmental biology between the 1940s and 1960s. He is one of the few pre-molecular-age developmental bi...

YouTube video by The Baby Fact Check

Over the first 100 days post-partum human brain functions may undergo rapid changes, with plasticity peaking. Studies of task-free functional connecti…

Children born with upper limb difference show the incredible adaptability of the young brain

Babies as young as two-months-old can categorise objects in their brains, which is far younger th...

Boards asked to recommend just three applications for funding, as BBSRC also suspends calls

Subtle changes in the body can reveal a great deal about early brain development. One such change is the pupillary light reflex (PLR): the automatic constriction of the pupil in response to…

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes …

Automated behavioral measurement using machine learning is gaining ground in psychological research. Automated approaches have the potential to reduce the labor and time associated with manual behavio...

The structure of the environment includes more horizontal and vertical (i.e. cardinal) orientations than oblique orientations, meaning that edges t...

Analyses of symptoms and genomic data indicate that autism that manifests in early childhood is distinct from autism that is diagnosed later in development.

Academic who showed little tolerance for IQ testing, but made steps towards a treatment for Alzheimer’s, dies aged 87

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Background There is a pressing need for research on neurodevelopmental conditions to focus on predictors of resilient or positive outcomes, rather than core symptoms and impairment. One promising av.....

Developmentally-driven computational modeling study suggests that early sensory experience shapes distinct neuronal response properties in the visual system, providing a potential account of the emerg...

A genome-wide association study of age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants found 11 significant loci. Age at onset of walking showed SNP heritability of 24%, a reliable polygenic score and gene...

Following his ground-breaking work on the Enigma machines at Bletchley Park, in 1943 Turing (KC 1931) turned to building a portable voice encoder for short-distance transmission to be used in military...

Despite the immaturity of the visual cortex, infants exhibit remarkable perceptual abilities. The pulvinar is hypothesized to support perceptual abilities in infancy and even scaffold the initial deve...

The Dawson Professorship of Young People's Mental Health in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

Translational Psychiatry - Understanding the development of a functional brain circuit: reward processing as an illustration

Sensory experience transforms endogenously structured cortical networks with diverse and unreliable visual responses into reliable representations. This process is proposed to involve the alignment of feedforward and recurrent networks.

Recent advances in imaging reveal that birth is a punctuate event in the development of brain and behaviour, which begins in the womb and continues in infancy. Meredith Weiss et al. review our underst...