text: By Karl Terry: Freedom New Mexico Portales will play host to one of five regional forums on rural economic development from 1-3 p.m. Monday at the Memorial Building in Portales. The forum is sponsored by New Mexico First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization designed to engage citizens in public policy, which was co-founded 20 years ago […]
  By Paula Cronic: Freedom Newspapers Five recommendations for improving the state’s higher education were the main focus at Friday’s New Mexico First community meeting at Eastern New Mexico University. New Mexico First Associate Director Heather Balas met with nearly 40 Portales and Clovis community and business leaders and educators to discuss the recommendations, stating education […]
  Filed Under: News Tagged With: balas, college, education, hall, higher, jobs, mexico, people, recommendations, town
  By Kevin Wilson: Freedom Newspapers A former Portales resident is part of a group trying to bring a grassroots feel to the national presidential debates. Heather Balas, a 1987 graduate of Portales High School and 1991 graduate of Eastern New Mexico University, is the director of voter education for the non-profit, non-partisan Commission on Presidential […]
  By David Arkin: CNJ Correspondent ALBUQUERQUE — Glenda Balas grew up on a peanut farm in Portales and watched her mother play a vital role in the success of her family’s business. She also watched her mother, Verla Brown, 80, receive little credit for the successes. That’s one of the reasons the University of New […]
  
  Positron emission tomography (PET) was used to investigate the hypothesis that older adults' difficulties with temporal-order memory are related to deficits in frontal function. Young (mean 24.7 years) and old (mean 68.6 years) participants studied a list of words, and were then scanned while retrieving information about what words were in the list (item retrieval) or when they occurred within the list (temporal-order retrieval). There were three main results. First, whereas the younger adults engaged right prefrontal regions more during temporal-order retrieval than during item retrieval, the older adults did not. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that context memory deficits in older adults are due to frontal dysfunction. Second, ventromedial temporal activity during item memory was relatively unaffected by aging. This finding concurs with evidence that item memory is relatively preserved in old adults and with the notion that medial temporal regions are involved in automatic retrieval operations. Finally, replicating the result of a previous study (Cabeza, R., Grady, C. L, Nyberg, L., McIntosh, A. R., Tulving, E., Kapur, S., Jennings, J. M., Houle, S., & Craik, F. I. M., 1997), the old adults showed weaker activations than the young adults in the right prefrontal cortex but stronger activations in the left prefrontal cortex. The age-related increase in left prefrontal activity may be interpreted as compensatory. Taken together, the results suggest that age-related changes in brain activity are rather process- and region-specific, and that they involve increases as well as decreases in neural activity.