Jarrad A G Lum

Deakin University · School of Psychology

Neuroimaging resting state paradigms have revealed synchronised oscillatory activity is present even in the absence of completing a task or mental operation. One function of this neural activity is likely to optimise the brain's sensitivity to forthcoming information that, in turn, likely promotes subsequent learning and memory outcomes. The curren...

Functional neuroimaging has consistently implicated the fronto-basal ganglia-cerebellar circuit in procedural learning – defined as the incidental acquisition of sequence information through repetition. Limited work has probed the role of white matter fiber pathways that connect the regions in this network, such as the superior cerebellar peduncles...

Growing evidence supports functional network alterations in autism spectrum disorder, however much less is known about the neural mechanisms underlying autistic traits in typically developing children. Using resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings, we examined whether functional connectivity could predict autistic trait expression in...

Implicit sequence learning describes the acquisition of serially ordered movements and sequentially structured cognitive information, that occurs without awareness. Theta, alpha and beta cortical oscillations are present during implicit motor sequence learning, but their role in this process is unclear. The current study addressed this gap in the l...

Facial emotions are often processed in light of moral information, which can assist in predicting and interpreting the intentions of another. Neurophysiological measures of facial emotion processing (FEP) may be sensitive to moral content. Relatively little is known, however, about the relationship between moral content and FEP during early-to-midd...

There is currently no robust method to evaluate how built environment design affects our emotion. Understanding emotion is significant, as it influences cognitive processes, behavior, and wellbeing, and is linked to the functioning of physiological systems. As mental health problems are becoming more prevalent, and exposure to indoor environments i...

Spontaneous neural oscillatory activity reflects the brain’s functional architecture and has previously been shown to correlate with perceptual, motor and executive skills. The current study used resting state electroencephalography to examine the relationship between spontaneous neural oscillatory activity and children’s language skills. Participa...

Human social cognition is considered an essential skill necessary for socially appropriate behaviours and social integration. Childhood is a time of rapid social expansion and growing independence from parents, but it is also a period of vulnerability in which children may have unequal opportunities for optimal development. Accumulating evidence su...

Understanding built environment exposure as a component of environmental enrichment has significant implications for mental health, but little is known about the effects design characteristics have on our emotions and associated neurophysiology. Using a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment while monitoring indoor environmental quality (IEQ), 18 parti...

The neurodevelopmental period spanning early-to-middle childhood represents a time of significant growth and reorganisation throughout the cortex. Such changes are critical for the emergence and maturation of a range of social and cognitive processes. Here, we utilised both eyes open and eyes closed resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) to exa...

Growing evidence supports functional network alterations in autism spectrum disorder, however much less is known about the neural mechanisms underlying autistic traits in typically developing children. Using resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings, we examined whether functional connectivity could predict autistic trait expression in...

Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion reco...

The environmental influences on early childhood development are understudied. The association between vegetation cover (i.e. trees, shrubs, grassed areas) in four key behaviour settings and socioemotional functioning was investigated in 1196 young children (2-5 years). Emotional difficulties were inversely associated with vegetation cover in the ho...

The neurodevelopmental period spanning early-to-middle childhood represents a time of significant growth and reorganisation throughout the cortex. Such changes are critical for the emergence and maturation of a range of social and cognitive processes. Here, we utilised both eyes open and eyes closed resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) to exa...

Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion reco...

Theory of mind (ToM) development is critical to effective social functioning and appears to depend on complementary language abilities. The current study explored the mediating influence of language on the development of both cognitive and affective ToM. A total of 151 children aged 5–12 years completed ToM (cognitive and affective) and language as...

This study examined the effects of a daytime nap on the retention of implicitly learnt “first-order conditional” (FOC) and “second-order conditional” (SOC) motor sequences. The implicit learning and retention of a motor sequence has been linked to the neural processes undertaken by the basal ganglia and primary motor cortex (i.e., procedural memory...

Procedural memory functioning in developmental language disorder (DLD) has largely been investigated by examining implicit sequence learning by the manual motor system. This study examined whether poor sequence learning in DLD is present in the oculomotor domain. Twenty children with DLD and 20 age-matched typically developing (TD) children were pr...

Facial emotion processing (FEP) develops throughout childhood and provides crucial social information necessary for the interpretation and prediction of others’ behaviour. This systematic review, which includes a meta-regression component, sought to explore the development of FEP event-related potentials (P100, N170, and late positive potential [LP...

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is activated when bilinguals switch between languages. Language switching can also elicit the N2 event-related potential (ERP). This ERP component appears to capture the cognitive control processes related to conflict monitoring, response selection and response inhibition. In the present study, continuous...

Poor working memory functioning is commonly found in schizophrenia. A number of studies have now tested whether non-invasive brain stimulation can improve this aspect of cognitive functioning. This report used meta-analysis to synthesise the results of these studies to examine whether transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) or repetitive transcra...

There is currently no robust method to evaluate how built environment design affects our emotion. Understanding emotion is significant, as it influences cognitive processes, behaviour, and wellbeing, and is linked to the functioning of physiological systems. As mental health problems are becoming more prevalent, and exposure to indoor environments...

Background Existing research indicates that spending time in nature is associated with diverse aspects of children’s health and wellbeing. Although fundamental to later life chances and health, no systematic reviews, to our knowledge, have focused specifically on the effects of interaction with nature on socioemotional functioning in childhood. Ob...

Gait abnormalities are frequently reported in autism. The empirical literature, however, is characterized by inconsistent findings concerning which aspects of gait are affected. We conducted a meta‐analysis to summarize study findings that examined temporal and spatial (i.e., two‐dimensional) gait parameters in pediatric and adult samples comprisin...

Objective: The objective of the present study was to determine if consolidation of procedural memory in developmental dyslexia (DD) may be supported by prolonging the initial learning session. Method: Children with DD (n = 31) and typically developing (TD) children (n = 34) were given a procedural (implicit sequence) learning task over two session...

Importance: More than half of patients with alcohol use disorder who receive inpatient withdrawal treatment relapse within weeks of discharge, hampering subsequent uptake and effectiveness of psychological and pharmacologic interventions. Cognitive bias modification (CBM) improves outcomes after alcohol rehabilitation, but the efficacy of deliveri...

The association between vegetation cover (comprising trees, shrubs, and grassed areas) in four key behaviour settings for children aged 2-5 and socioemotional functioning was investigated (n = 1196). The results showed that emotional difficulties were inversely associated with vegetation cover in the home yard (OR: 0.81 [0.69-0.96]) and neighbourho...

Theory of mind (ToM) development is critical to effective social functioning and appears to depend on complementary language abilities. The current study explored the mediating influence of language on the development of cognitive and affective ToM. 151 children aged between 5-12 years completed ToM (cognitive and affective) and language assessment...

Debate continues on whether a bilingual advantage exists with respect to executive functioning. This report synthesized the results of 170 studies to test whether the bilingual advantage is dependent on the task used to assess executive functioning and the age of the participants. The results of the meta-analyses indicated that the bilingual advant...

This study examined the changes in saccadic amplitude associated with learning a visual sequence. The oculomotor system gradually adjusts saccadic parameters when tracking a visual stimulus, which has a predictable trajectory. In these contexts, the change in saccadic amplitudes leads to predictive fixations. That is, fixations made to a position i...

Background. Existing research indicates that spending time in nature is associated with diverse aspects of children’s health and wellbeing. Although fundamental to later life chances and health, no systematic reviews, to our knowledge, have focused specifically on the effects of interaction with nature on socioemotional functioning in childhood....

Behavioral studies have shown that the ability to discriminate between non-native speech sounds improves after seeing how the sounds are articulated. This study examined the influence of visual articulatory information on the neural correlates of non-native speech sound discrimination. English speakers’ discrimination of the Hindi dental and retrof...

Prior research has demonstrated that linguistic skills and knowledge contribute to successful reading acquisition. In contrast, little is known about the influence of domain‐general learning abilities on reading. To investigate associations between general memory functions and reading during the early stages of learning to read, performance measure...

Procedural memory underpins the learning of skills and habits. It is often tested in children and adults with sequence learning on the serial reaction time (SRT) task, which involves manual motor control. However, due to infants' slowly developing control of motor actions, most procedures that require motor control cannot be examined in infancy. He...

Sequence learning underlies numerous motor, cognitive, and social skills. Previous models and empirical investigations of sequence learning in humans and non-human animals have implicated cortico-basal ganglia-cerebellar circuitry as well as other structures. To systematically examine the functional neuroanatomy of sequence learning in humans, we c...

Objective Australian football is associated with a risk of concussion. However, despite the extensive and varied nature of literature devoted to this issue, concussion incidence has not been systematically evaluated. To address this, we aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of concussion incidence in Australian football. Design Systematic review. Prospe...

Sensory experiences, such as sound, often result from our motor actions. Over time, repeated sound-producing performance can generate sensorimotor associations. However, it is not clear how sensory and motor information are associated. Here, we explore if sensory prediction is associated with the formation of sensorimotor associations during a lear...

Purpose: Children’s narrative accounts of their experiences are central to the prosecution of perpetrators of alleged maltreatment. We describe the narrative language skills of children who were placed in out-of-home care (OOHC) following substantiated maltreatment. It was hypothesised that (i) children with such histories would display narrative l...

Background Adolescence is a critical developmental period in the trajectory of nicotine dependence, highlighting the need for a greater understanding of the modifiable risk factors. An extensive body of research has found that trait impulsivity is associated with higher levels of adolescent smoking; however, findings have been mixed. The present st...

The primary motor area (M1) has been implicated in visuomotor sequence learning. However, it has been suggested there are multiple neural networks that undertake visuomotor sequence learning. The role of M1 in sequence learning may be specific to learning simple sequences comprising predictable associations between adjacent movements. This study ai...

Mirror neurons (MN) have been proposed as the neural substrate for a wide range of clinical, social and cognitive phenomena. Over the last decade, a commonly used tool for investigating MN activity in the human brain has been functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) repetition suppression (RS) paradigms. However, the available evidence is mixed, largel...

In a recent paper (“The procedural learning deficit hypothesis of language learning disorders: We see some problems”, Developmental Science, 2018), West, Vadillo, Shanks, and Hulme (2018) aimed to test the procedural deficit hypothesis (PDH) of specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia. This hypothesis proposes that abnormalities of brain str...

Objectives: This study examined the effects of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS) on sentence and word comprehension in healthy adults. Methods: Healthy adult participants, aged between 19 and 30 years, received either a-tDCS over the left inferior frontal gyrus (n=18) or sham stimulation (n=18). Participants completed sente...

Impulsive personality traits and adolescent cigarette smoking: A meta-analysis. Published manuscript can be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2019.01.018

Background People with alcohol use disorders often exhibit an “alcohol approach bias”, the automatically triggered action tendency to approach alcohol. Approach bias is likely to persist following withdrawal from alcohol, and contribute to the high rate of relapse following withdrawal treatment. Cognitive bias modification (CBM) training has been s...

This study examined whether the P1, N1, and P3 ERP components would be sensitive to sequence learning effects on the serial reaction time task. On this task, participants implicitly learn a visuospatial sequence. Participants in this study were 35 healthy adults. Reaction time (RT) data revealed that, at the group level, participants learned the se...

This study examined the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in the implicit learning and retention of a 'simple' first order conditional (FOC) sequence and a relatively 'complex' second order conditional (SOC) sequence, using anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (a-tDCS). Groups of healthy adults received either a-tDCS (n = 18) over t...

We administered the GSS-2, a standardised measure of suggestibility, to 5- to 12-year-old children to ascertain whether neglected children's responses to leading questions distinguish them from those of their non-neglected counterparts. Neglected children (n = 75) were more likely than an age-matched sample of non-neglected children (n = 75) to yie...

Significance It has long been debated whether the mechanisms that underlie language are dedicated to this uniquely human capacity or whether in fact they serve more general-purpose functions. Our study provides strong evidence that language—indeed both first and second language—is learned, in specific ways, by general-purpose neurocognitive mechani...

Objectives: Many women report declines in cognitive function during pregnancy, but attempts to empirically evaluate such changes have yielded inconsistent results. We aimed to determine whether pregnancy is associated with objective declines in cognitive functioning, and to assess the progression of any declines during pregnancy. Study design: W...

Recent neuroimaging studies have reported atypical neural activation in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) during tasks assessing manual dexterity. However, small sample sizes and subtle differences in task parameters have led to inconsistent findings, rendering interpretation difficult. The aim of the present meta-analysis was...

While a compelling body of behavioral research suggests that individuals with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) experience difficulties engaging motor imagery (MI), very little is known about the neural correlates of this deficit. Since corticospinal excitability is a predictor of MI proficiency in healthy adults, we reasoned that decreased...

Background: Adaptive working memory training is being implemented without an adequate understanding of developmental trajectories of working memory. We aimed to quantify from Grade 1 to Grade 3 of primary school (1) changes in verbal and visuospatial working memory and (2) whether low verbal and visuospatial working memory in Grade 1 predicts low...

Often, during daily experiences, hearing peers' actions can activate motor regions of the CNS. This activation is termed auditory-motor resonance (AMR) and is thought to represent an internal simulation of one's motor memories. Currently, AMR is demonstrated at the neuronal level in the Macaque and songbird, in conjunction with evidence on a system...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting motor and cognitive abilities. There is no cure for PD, therefore identifying safe therapies to alleviate symptoms remains a priority. This meta-analysis quantified the effectiveness of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial electrical stimulation (TES)...

This study examined the extent to which maltreatment history and the characteristics of out-of-home care correlated with the language and social skills of maltreated children. Participants in this study were 82 maltreated children aged between 5 and 12 years of age. All children were residing with state-designated carers in out-of-home-care. The ch...

Background: Procedural memory has been proposed to underlie the acquisition of a range of skills including grammar, reading, and motor skills. In developmental language disorder (DLD) it has been suggested that procedural memory problems lead to the difficulties with grammar in this group. Aims: This study aimed to extend previous research by ex...

The serial reaction time task (SRTT) has been used to study procedural learning in clinical populations. In this report, second-order meta-analysis was used to investigate whether disorder type moderates performance on the SRTT. Using this approach to quantitatively summarise past research, it was tested whether autism spectrum disorder, developmen...

Purpose In this study pupillometry was used to investigate the allocation of attentional resources associated with sentence comprehension in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method Eighteen children with SLI (age: M = 6.4 years) and 18 typically developing (TD) children (age: M = 6.3 years) participated in the study. A...

This study compared the performance of a low-cost wireless EEG system to a research-grade EEG system on an auditory oddball task designed to elicit N200 and P300 ERP components. Participants were 15 healthy adults (6 female) aged between 19 and 40 (M = 28.56; SD = 6.38). An auditory oddball task was presented comprising 1,200 presentations of a sta...

Objectives: It is unclear whether the primary motor cortex (PMC) is involved in the mental simulation of movement [i.e., motor imagery (MI)]. The present study aimed to clarify PMC involvement using a highly novel adaptation of the hand laterality task (HLT). Methods: Participants were administered single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation...

Background: Brain and cognitive development during the first 1000 days from conception are affected by multiple biomedical and socioenvironmental determinants including nutrition, health, nurturing, and stimulation. An improved understanding of the long-term influence of these factors is needed to prioritise public health investments to optimise hu...

Background: Evidence indicates that substance-related cognitive biases (attentional, memory, and approach bias) contribute to the maintenance and development of substance misuse. Impulsivity has been suggested to influence how cognitive biases contribute to substance misuse, possibly by biasing incentive salience attribution processes. However, th...

We examined learning and retention in nonverbal and verbal declarative memory in Hungarian children with (n = 21) and without (n = 21) SLI. Recognition memory was tested both 10 minutes and one day after encoding. On nonverbal items, only the children with SLI improved overnight, with no resulting group differences in performance. In the verbal dom...

Dataset behind analyses in ‘Learning and overnight retention in declarative memory in specific language impairment’. (XLS)

Individual participant performance on the nonverbal task for the SLI (A) and TD (B) groups. The figures show d’ performance for each individual, collapsed over both Real and Novel items, at both Recognition (10 minutes after encoding) and Retention (24 hours after encoding). SLI: children with specific language impairment; TD: typically-developing...

A core claim of the procedural deficit hypothesis of specific language impairment (SLI) is that the disorder is associated with poor implicit sequence learning. This study investigated whether implicit sequence learning problems in SLI are present for first-order conditional (FOC) and higher order conditional (HOC) sequences. Twenty-five children w...

Impairments in statistical learning might be a common deficit among individuals with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Using meta-analysis, we examined statistical learning in SLI (14 studies, 15 comparisons) and ASD (13 studies, 20 comparisons) to evaluate this hypothesis. Effect sizes were examined as a functi...

Background: Relapse is common in alcohol-dependent individuals and can be triggered by alcohol-related cues in the environment. It has been suggested that these individuals develop cognitive biases, in which cues automatically capture attention and elicit an approach action tendency that promotes alcohol seeking. The study aim was to examine wheth...

There has been considerable focus placed on how individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) visually perceive and attend to social information, such as facial expressions or social gaze. The role of eye movements is inextricable from visual perception, however this aspect is often overlooked. We performed a series of meta-analyses based on data...

This review provides a meta-analysed male:female prevalence ratio of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) during middle childhood in non-referred children. It also analyses sex differences in prevalence across cultures and over time. A systematic search for studies via the following sources was conducted: PsycInfo, Web of Knowledge, Medline Complete...