Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Can brief messages about health influence children's consumption of identical foods? Across a series of studies, we manipulated children's consumption of identical foods (fruit sauces) by pairing those foods with brief messages about each food's health status.
The goals of this research were to obtain initial estimates of the prevalence of each of four types of motor speech disorders in children with idiopathic Speech Delay (SD) and to use findings to estimate the population-based prevalence of each disorder. Analyses were completed on audio-recorded conversational speech samples from 415 children recruited for research in idiopathic SD in six USA cities during the past three decades.
Children’s drawings have long been used to assess aspects of general cognitive functioning, intelligence, perceptual motor development, and even socio-emotional development. The goal of the current study was to examine the structure of children's drawings using crowd-sourced human similarity judgments and machine vision approaches.
Mutations and duplication events in AT-1/SLC33A1 are highly pleiotropic and have been linked to diseases such as spastic paraplegia, developmental delay, autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, propensity to seizures, and dysmorphism.
Although the configurations of facial muscles that humans perceive vary continuously, we often represent emotions as categories. This suggests that, as in other domains of categorical perception such as speech and color perception, humans become attuned to features of emotion cues that map onto meaningful thresholds for these signals given their environments.
Previous experiments using genetic and pharmacological manipulations have provided strong evidence that etomidate impairs synaptic plasticity and memory by modulating a5-subunit containing GABAARs (a5-GABAARs). Since a5-GABAARs mediate tonic inhibition (TI) in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells, and etomidate enhances TI, etomidate enhancement of TI in pyramidal cells has been proposed as the underlying mechanism (Martin et al., 2009).
The Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, launched a new fund to support interdisciplinary research in the area of intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) genomics.
Waisman Center investigator Sigan Hartley, PhD, has been honored with a Romnes Faculty Fellowship. Romnes awards recognize exceptional faculty members who have earned tenure within the last six years. The awards are supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and are named for the late H.I. Romnes, former chairman of the board of AT&T …
We present a new computational model of speech motor control: the Feedback-Aware Control of Tasks in Speech or FACTS model. This model is based on a state feedback control architecture, which is widely accepted in non-speech motor domains. The FACTS model employs a hierarchical observer-based architecture, with a distinct higher-level controller of speech tasks and a lower-level controller of speech articulators.
Daniel Bolt, PhD, has been recognized with a Kellet Mid-Career Award. The Kellett Mid-Career award was created to provide needed support and encouragement to faculty at a critical stage of their careers. The award is named for the late William R. Kellett, a former president of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation board of trustees and …
