Biomedical subjects

Donna Coch

Publications and source records attributed to Donna Coch.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Bridges over troubled waters: education and cognitive neuroscience.

Recently there has been growing interest in and debate about the relation between cognitive neuroscience and education. Our goal is to advance the debate beyond both recitation of potentially education-related cognitive neuroscience findings and the claim that a bridge between fields is chimerical. In an attempt to begin a dialogue about mechanisms among students, educators, researchers and practitioner-scientists, we propose that multiple bridges can be built to make connections between education and cognitive neuroscience, including teacher training, researcher training and collaboration. These bridges--concrete mechanisms that can advance the study of mind, brain and education--will benefit both educators and cognitive neuroscientists, who will gain new perspectives for posing and answering crucial questions about the learning brain.

Brain↗

PubMed2005

Selective auditory attention in 3- to 5-year-old children: an event-related potential study.

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests that the development of selective attention extends over the first two decades of life. However, much of this research may underestimate the attention abilities of young children. By providing strong, redundant attention cues, we show that sustained endogenous selective attention has similar effects on ERP indices of auditory processing in adults and children as young as 3 years old. All participants were cued to selectively attend to one of two simultaneously presented stories that differed in location (left/right), voice (male/female), and content. The morphology of the ERP waveforms elicited by probes embedded in the stories was very different for adults, who showed a typical positive-negative-positive pattern in the 300 ms after probe onset, and children, who showed a single broad positivity during this epoch. However, for 3- to 5-year-olds, 6- to 8-year-olds, and adults, probes in the attended story elicited larger amplitude ERPs beginning around 100 ms after probe onset. This attentional modulation of exogenously driven components was longer in duration for the youngest children. In addition, attended linguistic probes elicited a larger negativity 300-500 ms for all groups, indicative of additional attentional processing. These data show that with adequate cues, even children as young as 3 years old can selectively attend to one auditory stream while ignoring another and that doing so alters auditory sensory processing at an early stage. Furthermore, they suggest that the neural mechanisms by which selective attention affects auditory processing are remarkably adult-like by this age.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Auditory and visual refractory period effects in children and adults: an ERP study.

OBJECTIVE: This developmental study was designed to investigate event-related potential (ERP) refractory period effects in the auditory and visual modalities in children and adults and to correlate these electrophysiological measures with standard behavioral measures. METHODS: ERPs, accuracy, and reaction time were recorded as school-age children and adults monitored a stream of repetitive standard stimuli and detected occasional targets. Standards were presented at various interstimulus intervals (ISIs) in order to measure refractory period effects on early sensory components. RESULTS: As has been reported previously in adults, larger components for standards with longer ISIs were observed for an auditory N1 and the visual occipital P1 and P2 in adults. Remarkably similar effects were observed in children. However, only children showed refractory effects on the amplitude of the visual N1 and P2 measured at anterior sites. Across groups, behavioral accuracy and reaction time were correlated with latencies of auditory N1 and visual P2 across ISI conditions. CONCLUSIONS: The results establish a normal course of development for auditory and visual ERP refractory period effects across the 6- to 8-year-old age range and indicate similar refractoriness in the neural systems indexed by ERPs in these paradigms in typically developing children and adults. Further, the results suggest that electrophysiological measures and standard behavioral measures may at least in part index similar processing in the present paradigms. SIGNIFICANCE: These findings provide a foundation for further investigation into atypical development, particularly in those populations for which processing time deficits have been implicated such as children with specific language impairment or dyslexia.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

Motion and color processing in school-age children and adults: an ERP study.

Stimuli designed to selectively elicit motion or color processing were used in a developmental event-related potential study with adults and children aged 6, 7 and 8. A positivity at posterior site INZ (P-INZ) was greater to motion stimuli only in adults. The P1 and N1 were larger to color stimuli in both adults and children, but earlier to motion stimuli only in adults. Finally, the P2 was larger to color stimuli in adults but larger to motion stimuli in children, and earlier to motion stimuli only in children. The findings across components indicate development from middle childhood to adulthood in aspects of both the motion and color processing systems indexed by this paradigm, but are consistent with an hypothesis of a more protracted time course of development for the motion as compared to the color processing system.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Automatic word form processing in masked priming: an ERP study.

Five prime types (unrelated words, pronounceable nonwords, illegal strings of letters, false fonts, or neutral strings of Xs) preceded word and nonword targets in a masked priming study designed to investigate word form processing as indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants performed a lexical decision task on targets. In the 150-250-ms epoch at fronto-central, central, and temporo-parietal sites ERPs were smallest to targets preceded by words and nonwords, followed by letter strings, false fonts, and finally neutral primes. This refractory pattern sensitive to orthography supports the view that ERPs in the 150-250-ms epoch index activation of neural systems involved in word form processing and suggests that such activation may be graded, being maximal with word-like stimuli and relatively reduced with alphabet-like stimuli. Further, these results from a masked priming paradigm confirm the automatic nature of word form processing.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

ERP nonword rhyming effects in children and adults.

In a simple prime-target auditory rhyming event-related potential (ERP) paradigm with adults and 6-, 7-, and 8-year-old children, nonword stimuli (e.g., nin-rin, ked-voo) were used to investigate neurocognitive systems involved in rhyming and their development across the early school years. Even absent semantic content, the typical CNV to primes and late rhyming effect (RE) to targets were evident in all age groups. The RE consisted of a more negative response to nonrhyming targets as compared to rhyming targets over posterior sites, with a reversal of this pattern at lateral anterior sites. The hypothesis that the CNV indexes phonological memory processes was not well supported by correlation analyses conducted with the ERP measures and scores on standardized behavioral tests. However, the onset of the rhyming effect was later in those scoring lower on phonological awareness measures.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

An event-related potential study of selective auditory attention in children and adults.

In a dichotic listening paradigm, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to linguistic and nonlinguistic probe stimuli embedded in 2 different narrative contexts as they were either attended or unattended. In adults, the typical N1 attention effect was observed for both types of probes: Probes superimposed on the attended narrative elicited an enhanced negativity compared to the same probes when unattended. Overall, this sustained attention effect was greater over medial and left lateral sites, but was more posteriorly distributed and of longer duration for linguistic as compared to nonlinguistic probes. In contrast, in 6- to 8-year-old children the ERPs were morphologically dissimilar to those elicited in adults and children displayed a greater positivity to both types of probe stimuli when embedded in the attended as compared to the unattended narrative. Although both adults and children showed attention effects beginning at about 100 msec, only adults displayed left-lateralized attention effects and a distinct, posterior distribution for linguistic probes. These results suggest that the attentional networks indexed by this task continue to develop beyond the age of 8 years.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2003

The N400 in beginning readers.

In an event-related potentials study of brain-behavior relations during learning-to-read, girls in first grade viewed known words, unknown words, difficult words, and nonwords presented in list form. Participants were divided into low-ability and high-ability reading groups based on standardized test scores. During the 300- to 600-ms epoch, low-ability readers lacked a substantial N400 while high-ability readers evidenced a large, widely distributed negativity to all word types. During the 600- to 1,000-ms epoch, high-ability readers showed effects of repetition while low-ability readers did not. The findings indicate a less selective neurocognitive word-processing system in children as compared to adults and suggest that the N400 may serve as an oblique index of the automaticity of lower level processing.

Brain↗

PubMed2002

Word and picture processing in children: an event-related potential study.

In an investigation of the N400 component, event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by 4 types of word stimuli (real words, pseudowords, random letter strings, and false fonts) and 3 types of picture stimuli (real pictures, pseudopictures, and picture parts) presented in separate lists were recorded from 10- and 11-year-old children. All types of word stimuli elicited an anteriorly distributed negativity peaking at about 400 msec (antN400). Words and pseudowords elicited similar ERPs, whereas ERPs to letter strings differed from those to both pseudowords and false fonts. All types of picture stimuli elicited dual anterior negativities (N350 and N430). Real pictures and pseudopictures elicited similar ERPs, whereas pseudopictures and picture parts elicited asymmetrical processing. The results are discussed in terms of increased sensitivity to and dependence on context in children.

Child↗