Gina Rippon

• PhD
• Chair at Aston University

Sex/gender differences in the human brain attract attention far beyond the neuroscience community. Given the interest of nonspecialists, it is important that researchers studying human female–male brain difference assume greater responsibility for the accurate communication of their findings.

There is increasing interest in understanding how the phase and amplitude of distinct neural oscillations might interact to support dynamic communication within the brain. In particular, previous work has demonstrated a coupling between the phase of low frequency oscillations and the amplitude (or power) of high frequency oscillations during certai...

Neuroimaging (NI) technologies are having increasing impact in the study of complex cognitive and social processes. In this emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience, a central goal should be to increase the understanding of the interaction between the neurobiology of the individual and the environment in which humans develop and function. Th...

Why is popular understanding of female-male differences still based on rigid models of development, even though contemporary developmental sciences emphasize plasticity? Is it because the science of sex differences still works from the same rigid models?

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability to reading development in 142 English-speaking children from the start of kindergarten to the middle of Grade 2. Partial cross-lagged analyses revealed significant relationships between early performance on block design and mat...

Autism is a developmental disorder that is currently defined in terms of a triad of impairments in social interaction, communication, and behavioural flexibility. Psychological models have focussed on deficits in high level social and cognitive processes, such as ‘weak central coherence’ and deficits in ‘theory of mind’. Converging evidence from di...

Evidence of systematic double-dissociations of neural activity associated with the generation of regular and irregular past tense in healthy individuals may prove decisive in distinguishing between single- and dual-route models of morphological processing, because the former (connectionist models of morphological processing) have only been able to...

If, as suggested, creative (insight) problem solving is less systematic and employs less planning than analytical problem solving, the former requires substantially less working memory (WM) than the latter. Subjects simultaneously solved problems and counted auditory stimuli (concurrent WM task), in response to which ERPs were recorded. Counting di...

L asymmetry in beta activity in the dyslexic group, again in both tasks. Theta activity did discriminate between the two tasks in the dyslexic group. In the phonological task, task-related frontal theta in the dyslexic group was significantly different from the control group, with the former showing an increase in amplitude and the latter a decreas...

In schizophrenia reduction of the P300 amplitude is a robust statistical finding but with inconsistent evidence of symptom correlates and of lateral asymmetry. Here relations were examined with active and withdrawn syndromes which in other cognitive and electrophysiological measurement modalities have been associated with opposite functional asymme...

Previous studies using indirect measures of hemispheric specialization have indicated a link between lack of phonological awareness and reduced cerebral lateralisation. Using topographical mapping techniques this study aimed to investigate patterns of cortical activity in dyslexic children characterized by phonological processing difficulties. The...

Brain Electrical Activity Maps were recorded from 20 subjects whilst performing: (a) the Vandenberg & Kuse Mental Rotation Test (MRT) and: (b) the Isaac, Marks & Russell Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire (VMIQ), and under control conditions. Subjects were classified as good or poor imagers, first on the basis of their VMIQ scores, and sec...

Evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia have poor phonological processing skills, are less likely to show lateralised activation during the processing of verbal information than children with normal reading ability and tend towards the left of the handedness continuum. The present study investigated this relationship between cer...

It was predicted that the psychological differences between paranoids and nonparanoids would be parallelled by differences in psychophysiological responses to stimuli varying along both informational and motivational dimensions. Skin conductance and heart rate responses to stimuli in a guessing task were measured in a group of paranoid patients and...

In a continuing investigation of the relationship between differential hemispheric activation and electrodermal asymmetry, comparisons were made between the electroencephalographic asymmetries and electrodermal asymmetries exhibited by subjects carrying out particular tasks. Bilateral skin conductance responses and 28 channels of EEG data allowing...

A considerable number of investigations have been carried out into the relationship between differential hemispheric activation and elecrodermal asymmetry. These have employed a wide range of tasks, whose ability to differentially activate the hemispheres is often questionable. The resulting findings are frequently negative or conflicting (Freixa i...

• The children's ability to discriminate between words that differed in their middle sounds increased from stage 1 to stages 2 (p < 0.01), 3 (p = 0.01), 4 (p < 0.01) and 5 (p < 0.01), and from stages 2 (p < 0.01), 3 (p < 0.01) and 4 (p = 0.03) to stage 5. This study was designed to address some of these issues by examining the development of visual...