Empowering Children with Autism at School – the role of vocabulary skills

Dr. Purnama Sari explains how the method of “propensity score matching” (PSM) aids the understanding of neurodiversity in the classroom. Her study unravelled that vocabulary skills contribute to academic skills in autistic children, and not their gestational age, sex, birth weight, age, ethnicity, parental income, parental education, mother’s IQ, mother’s autistic traits, or mother’s depression score. This blog post may empower children with autism and their parents.

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Let’s write about sex and gender

Why and how do you measure sex or gender in your research participants? Are you still using a single binary question (male/female), or do you still add the option “other”? Are you aware of the differences between sex and gender? This blog post provides some hands-on best practices tips for including sex and/or gender in your research and for writing about them in an inclusive way.

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Why it is important to ask for visual complaints in people with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease

People with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease may experience visual complaints. Although these complaints do not always come forward during an assessment of visual functions, they are extremely bothersome in daily life. How can we ensure that these complaints are recognized and acknowledged in clinical practice?

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We’ve got your signal!

Most people know that electroencephalography (EEG) measures brain activity. But probably few know that the first measurement of the human EEG came from an attempt to scientifically test telepathy, and even fewer that one of the first EEG devices from Groningen inspired the founding of a Dutch company. This blog post provides interesting historical insights into the measurement technique of EEG and it’s relation to Psychology in Groningen.

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A forgiving cycle path: preventing bicycle crashes in the elderly

Cyclists are vulnerable, and particularly older cyclists have an increased risk of crashing. Therefore, Frank Westerhuis and his colleagues from the traffic psychology group investigated countermeasures to increase cyclists’ safety. This blog post reveals whether they were succesful in achieving this by using illusionary objects next to the cycle path.

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An anatomical look inside brain ’P-0255’

Who hasn’t wanted to look inside someone’s head, especially when that person is acting strangely? A look into the brain can indeed be revealing, both from a medical and neuropsychological point of view, but also from an educational one. This is literally the case with ’P-0255’. But P-0255 is not an old personnel number as a colleague suspected, nor is it a neuroimaging scan; it is the number of a specimen from the University Museum’s pathological brain collection that shows a particular form of traumatic brain injury: a coup contre-coup.

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Why teaching your (grand)parents how the computer works is so challenging: The Neuroscience of Learning and Healthy Aging

Learning helps us cope with changes in our surroundings, and also find the best neighborhood ice cream parlor. Yet, it usually becomes harder as we get older. Thankfully, scientific findings show that it doesn’t always have to be that way.

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