Educational interventions are frequently designed to occur during early childhood, based on the idea that earlier intervention will have greater long-term academic benefits. However, surprisingly little is known about when cognitive and academic skills are most plastic, or malleable, during development. One way to study plasticity is to ask…

The development of skills related to executive function (EF) in infancy, including their emergence, underlying neural mechanisms, and interconnections to other cognitive skills, is an area of increasing research interest. Here, we report on findings from a multidimensional dataset demonstrating that infants' behavioral performance on a flexible…

Objective: The current study examined the association between subjective and objective cognitive measures and alcohol use in college students. Objective cognitive impairment is associated with alcohol use, however subjective cognitive impairment remains understudied in at-risk populations. Participants: Data were collected from 140 undergraduate…

The association between physical fitness and age-related differences in cognition and brain structure has been studied fairly extensively during development and aging, yet comparatively less in young adulthood. The current study examined 1,195 young adults aged 22 to 36 (54% female; 67% Caucasian) to better understand associations between physical…

Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas…

The ability to attend to one among multiple sources of information is central to everyday functioning. Just as central is the ability to switch attention among competing inputs as the task at hand changes. Such processes develop surprisingly slowly, such that even into adolescence, we remain slower and more error prone at switching among tasks…

Purpose: The Functional Assessment of Verbal Reasoning and Executive Strategies (FAVRES; MacDonald, 2005) test was designed for use by speech-language pathologists to assess verbal reasoning, complex comprehension, discourse, and executive skills during performance on a set of challenging and ecologically valid functional tasks. A recent French…

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

Background: Neuroimaging findings have provided evidence for a relation between variations in brain structures and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, longitudinal neuroimaging studies are typically confined to children who have already been diagnosed with ADHD. In a population-based study, we aimed to characterize the…

Marc Prensky coined the term "digital native" in 2001 to describe those who have grown up with a constant interaction of technology, including television, video games, and the Internet (Prensky, 2001). For these people, many of them now in their twenties, life has always included the presence of screens--televisions, cell phones, iPods, video…