East vs. West – Developmentally Early Differences in Attention

Growing evidence indicates a suite of generalized differences in the attentional and cognitive processes of adults from Eastern and Western cultures (Nisbett, 2003). Cognition in Eastern adults is characterized as more relational and in Western adults as more object focused (Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005). This chapter will present evidence on the early emergence of these differences in preschoolers from Japan and the U.S. and will also present initial findings on transmission of these cultural differences being very early

Inhibition and Adjective Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Children

The ability to control attention – by inhibiting pre-potent, yet no longer relevant information – is an essential skill in all of human learning, and increasing evidence suggests that this ability is enhanced in language learning environments in which the learner is managing and using more than one language. One question waiting to be addressed is whether such efficient attentional control plays a role in word learning. That is, children who must manage two languages also must manage to learn two languages and the advantages of more efficient attentional control may benefit aspects of language learning within each language. This study compared bilingual and monolingual children’s performances in an artificial word-learning task and in a non-linguistic task that measures attention control. Three-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with similar vocabulary development participated in these tasks. The results replicate earlier work showing advanced attentional control among bilingual children and suggest that this better attentional control may also benefit better performance in novel adjective learning. The findings provide the first direct evidence of a relation between performances in an artificial word-learning task and in an attentional control task. We discuss this finding with respect to the general relevance of attentional control for lexical learning in all children and with respect to current views of bilingual children’s word learning

A small number of abnormal brain connections predicts adult autism spectrum disorder

Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a serious lifelong condition, its underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Recently, neuroimaging-based classifiers for ASD and typically developed (TD) individuals were developed to identify the abnormality of functional connections (FCs). Due to over-fitting and interferential effects of varying measurement conditions and demographic distributions, no classifiers have been strictly validated for independent cohorts. Here we overcome these difficulties by developing a novel machine-learning algorithm that identifies a small number of FCs that separates ASD versus TD. The classifier achieves high accuracy for a Japanese discovery cohort and demonstrates a remarkable degree of generalization for two independent validation cohorts in the USA and Japan. The developed ASD classifier does not distinguish individuals with major depressive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder from their controls but moderately distinguishes patients with schizophrenia from their controls. The results leave open the viable possibility of exploring neuroimaging-based dimensions quantifying the multiple-disorder spectrum