Kathleen Taylor

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics

Dementia is one of the most frightening and devastating threats associated with ageing. This book sets out the latest science, considering both the amyloid cascade hypothesis and other, newer ideas about, for example, inflammation and the ageing brain. It looks at recent clinical trials, sets out what is known about major risk factors such as diabe...

Katherine Philips’s poetry survives in several early manuscript and printed sources. While these witnesses have been extensively studied by literary scholars, much about their textual origins and relationships remains unclear. In this article, the authors apply computational methods to analyse such aspects of these witnesses as similarity, compilat...

In a world full of science, the balance of power between sciences is changing. Advances in physics, chemistry, and other natural sciences have given us extraordinary control over our world. Now the younger sciences of brain and mind are applying the scientific method not only to our environments, but to us. In recent years funding and effort poured...

In this careful exploration of a difficult subject, I bring together the fruits of work in psychology, sociology, and myown field of neuroscience to shed light on the nature of cruelty and what makes human beings cruel. The question of cruelty is inevitably tied to questions of moral philosophy, the nature of evil, free will and responsibility. Lit...

Understanding intergroup prejudice is a dominant research focus for social psychology. Prejudice is usually conceptualized as a continuum of positive/negative affect, but this has limitations. It neither reflects people's ability to maintain simultaneous positive and negative stereotypes of others nor explains extreme prejudice (bigotry). Some rese...

Studying the most extreme outcomes of intergroup hatred--murder, mass killings and genocides--has long been part of historical and social research. Neuroscientists and psychologists have also been interested in interpersonal and intergroup violence. This article considers the question of how atrocities arise from a neuroscientific perspective, focu...

The term ‘brainwashing’ was first recorded in 1950, but it is an expression of a much older concept: the forcible and full-scale alteration of a person’s beliefs. Over the past 50 years the term has crept into popular culture, served as a topic for jokes, frightened the public in media headlines, and slandered innumerable people and institutions. I...

The aim of the study was to test the hypothesis that raised platelet-activating factor (PAF) may contribute to the aetiology of developmental dyslexia. PAF is a potent proinflammatory mediator which signals cell damage and facilitates natural killer cell activity. Raised PAF may help protect against tumourigenesis. As dyslexia has a partial genetic...

Recent research has provided evidence for a genetically mediated association between language or reading-related cognitive deficits and impaired motor coordination. Other studies have identified relationships between lateralization of hand skill and cognitive abilities. With a large sample, the authors aimed to investigate genetic relationships bet...

People with the learning disability developmental dyslexia characteristically have difficulties in processing written language. There is some evidence that they may also have talents in other areas such as visuospatial processing. This pattern of strengths and weaknesses may predispose people who have dyslexia towards adopting certain occupations a...

Selecting visual targets for saccadic eye movements is a vital step in sensorimotor processing. This selection is made on the basis of target salience: a saccade tends to be made to the most interesting part of the visual "eld. Both bottom-up and top-down processes have been postulated to contribute to salience, but the exact mechanisms by which so...

Developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental learning disability characterised by unexpectedly poor reading and unknown aetiology. One hypothesis proposes excessive platelet activating factor, a potent vasodilator, as a contributor, implying that there should be a negative association between dyslexia and high blood pressure (HBP). Since both con...

Post-mortem studies by Galaburda and colleagues on the brains of developmental dyslexics found characteristic neuronal abnormalities: ectopias, microgyria, and fewer large-soma cells in sensory thalamus. An association between dyslexia and immune dysfunction has also been proposed. We describe a mechanism which may explain these observations. Plate...

Much of neuroscience is currently dominated by an information processing metaphor which is largely conceptualized in discrete terms. An alternative metaphor conceptualizes information flow as continuous. A qualitative set of hypotheses based on this metaphor, the energy model, is described here. This model considers information transfer in terms of...

Developmental dyslexia is a complex syndrome whose exact cause remains unknown. It has been suggested that a problem with fatty acid metabolism may play a role, particularly in relation to the visual symptoms exhibited by many dyslexics. We explored this possibility using two self-report questionnaires, designed on the basis of clinical experience,...

There is mounting evidence that developmental dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder which involves abnormalities of fatty acid metabolism, particularly with respect to certain long-chain highly unsaturated fatty acids (HUFAs). Psychophysical evidence also strongly suggests that dyslexics may have visual deficits as well as phonological problems...

At the present time, the dominant conceptual framework in neuroscience views neurons as discrete information processing units. While this framework has undoubtedly been successful in explaining phenomena at the single-cell level, it has had less success in explaining large-scale neural phenomena such as cognitive disorders. An alternative conceptua...

Findlay & Walker's target article proposes a model of saccade generation related to the underlying neuroscience. A problem with such models is the number of brain areas showing oculomotor function. Traditionally, therefore, models have been partial, usually concentrating either on cortex (Liu et al. 1997; Pierrot Deseilligny et al. 1995) or on the...

Selecting visual targets for saccadic eye movements is a vital step in sensorimotor processing. This selection is made on the basis of target salience: a saccade tends to be made to the most interesting part of the visual field. Both bottom-up and top-down processes have been postulated to contribute to salience, but the exact mechanisms by which s...