Narrow Results

AUSTRALIA – Successful FDA end-of-Phase-2 for Hatchtech head lice product DeOVO^™

AUSTRALIA – Senz Oncology secures seed funding for promising cancer drug.

AUSTRALIA – Geneworks develops DNA barcodes for international security.

INDIA – Stress hormones: Good or Bad for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder risk?

SINGAPORE – New study shows fertility knowledge gaps may exacerbate Singapore's declining birth rate challenge.

SINGAPORE – World's first wearable robotic device for stroke rehabilitation comes to Singapore.

SRI LANKA – Conflicting reports highlight scientific data gaps in Sri Lanka's chronic kidney disease.

EUROPE – InDex Pharmaceuticals strengthens IP position for Kappaproct.

EUROPE – Novozymes and Terranol to market advanced biofuel yeast.

EUROPE – The world's first (official) biosimilar antibody goes to… Rheumatoid Arthritis.

USA – MRI reveals brain's response to reading.

USA – Novozymes partner Chemtex receives USDA commitment to build advanced biofuels plant in United States.

USA – Fossil fuel and renewable energy subsidies on the rise.

The aim of this study was to extend our understanding of the "asynchrony" phenomenon by examining the existence of several additional differences in brain activity. The differences which were investigated were the difference between the left and right hemisphere processing, the anterior and posterior areas processing and the differences between the different stages of information processing. These differences could account as an additional explanation for word decoding failure among individuals with dyslexia. The research utilized behavioral and electrophysiological (ERP - Event Related Potentials) measures in skilled and dyslexic university students. The subjects performed a lexical decision task presented in the visual and auditory modalities. The dyslexics exhibited a larger processing time interval between the activation of the P2 and P3 components, between the left and right hemisphere and between posterior and anterior regions of the cortex. Disharmony of the dyslexic brain is suggested as a possible explanation for the dyslexia phenomenon.

In the present work we analyzed the pupil size behavior of 40 subjects while they read well-defined sentences with different contextual predictability (i.e., regular sentences and proverbs). In general, pupil size increased when reading regular sentences, but when readers realized that they were reading proverbs their pupils strongly increase until finishing proverbs’ reading. Our results suggest that an increased pupil size is not limited to cognitive load (i.e., relative difficulty in processing) because when participants accurately recognized words during reading proverbs, theirs pupil size increased too. Our results show that pupil size dynamics may be a reliable measure to investigate the cognitive processes involved in sentence processing and memory functioning.

The “Simple model” of reading proposes that reading deficits can be understood in terms of single or combined contributions of comprehension and phonological impairments. Phonological or semantic deficits have been effectively tested in isolation in computational models of reading, and their results map onto the predictions of the simple model. However, the subtle interactions between impaired representations have not yet been fully explored. We implemented a connectionist triangle model of reading which learned to map between orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations of words for a large sample of monosyllabic words in English. During learning, the model was impaired in terms of its ability to stably represent phonological or semantic information. The model was then tested on a variety of word and picture naming tasks. The model replicated previous studies of dyslexia resulting from a phonological deficit, and comprehension difficulties resulting from a semantic deficit. However, we also found that impairment at either phonological or semantic representations affected the fidelity of representations throughout the model, indicating that pure deficits in reading will be difficult to observe. The implemented model provides constraints on the extent to which phonological and semantic information may interact in order to explain reading and its deficits.