Language acquisition
Children build language abilities from experience while their brains are developing. How do learning, prior capacities, and interaction produce that transformation?
Language and development
Within Language and development · Search all subjects
Developmental stuttering
Stuttering often begins while speech is developing, and many children later recover. What explains its onset and different developmental paths?
Odor-mixture perception
A blend can smell like its ingredients or like a new odor. What determines which percept emerges?
Sense of agency
We feel that our actions cause events. How do prediction and observed regularities combine to produce that feeling?
Body ownership
Vision and touch can make a rubber hand feel like your own. Which circuit processes produce this bodily attribution?
Metacognition
Choosing an answer and judging whether it is right are different tasks. Which brain computations produce that second judgment?
Theory of mind
Children learn to reason about what others know and want. How does this grow into understanding minds that influence one another?
Developmental dyslexia
Reading difficulty can involve language, sound–symbol learning, and reading circuits. How these factors interact over development remains unsettled.
Developmental dyscalculia
Persistent arithmetic difficulty can involve numbers, memory, strategy execution and strategy selection. Their developmental causal relationship remains incomplete.
Statistical learning
People pick up patterns through exposure. Which learning processes are shared across tasks and senses, and which are specialized, remains unsettled.
Infantile amnesia
Infants can form memories, yet adults recall few early-life episodes. How development changes memory persistence and later access remains unresolved.
Predictive language processing
Readers and listeners anticipate language. How several predictive mechanisms combine across linguistic structure and different people remains unsettled.
Ticklishness
Tickling can produce involuntary laughter and mixed feelings. How human touch processing, context and laughter circuits combine remains incomplete.
Transitive inference
Learning that A outranks B and B outranks C can let us compare A with C. How do people build and revise this knowledge?
Bilingual language control
Bilingual speakers can select and switch languages. How do control strategies adapt to conversation, competing demands and language experience?
Déjà vu
A new situation can feel familiar while you know that it is new. How does that clash arise?
Hypnotic suggestion
A suggestion can change how an arm feels, how an action seems to happen, or what someone perceives. The mechanisms differ across people and suggestions.
Tip-of-the-tongue states
A known word feels close but will not come out. When does another retrieval attempt clear the block, and when does the same block return?
McGurk effect
Hearing “ba” while seeing lips form “ga” can sound like “da.” Does the brain average possible speech causes or select among them?