This study examined how four domain-specific skills (arithmetic procedural skills, number fact retrieval, place value concept, and number sense) and two domain-general processing skills (working memory and processing speed) may account for Chinese children's mathematics learning difficulties. Children with mathematics difficulties (MD) of two age…

This study examined the impact of e-book text-tracking design on 4th graders' (10-year-old children's) learning of Chinese characters. The e-books used in this study were created with Adobe Flash CS 5.5 and Action Script 3.0. This study was guided by two main questions: (1) Is there any difference in learning achievement (Chinese character…

In this "FastFacts," a state's Department of Education requests information from the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes (CEELO) on how the research defines skills in social-emotional development, approaches to learning, and executive function, to inform planned revisions to the early childhood indicators of progress for children…

The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities…

The aim of the present study was to examine executive dysfunctioning and decreased processing speed as potential mediators of age-related differences in episodic memory. We compared the performances of young and elderly adults in a free-recall task. Participants were also given tests to measure executive functions and perceptual processing speed…

It has often been suggested that the role of Broca's region in sentence comprehension can be explained with reference to general cognitive mechanisms (e.g. working memory, cognitive control). However, the (language-related) basis for such proposals is often restricted to findings on English. Here, we argue that an extension of the database to…

The critical attributes of episodic memory are self, autonoetic consciousness and subjectively sensed time. The aim of this paper is to present a theoretical overview of our already published researches into the nature of episodic memory over the course of time. We have developed a new method of assessing "autobiographical" memory (TEMPau task),…

Explanations for the attentional blink (AB; a deficit in identifying the second of two targets when presented 200-500ms after the first) have recently shifted from limitations in memory consolidation to disruptions in cognitive control. With a new model based on the threaded cognition theory of multi-tasking we propose a different explanation: the…

The electrophysiological correlates of retrieval orientation--the differential processing of retrieval cues according to the nature of the sought-for information--were investigated in healthy young (18-20 years old) and older (63-77 years old) adults. In one pair of study-test cycles, subjects studied either words or pictures presented in one of…

A range of characteristics of learners is described and their relationship to working memory discussed in the context of teaching and learning in the sciences. The characteristics are extent of field dependency, visual spatial abilities, divergency and convergency. These learner characteristics were measured for a large sample of school pupils…

We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made during a narrative by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to depend on two areas of cognitive functioning: (a) judging…

Previous studies have shown that the right hemisphere processes the visual details of objects and the emotionality of information. These two roles of the right hemisphere have not been examined concurrently. In the present study, the authors examined whether right hemisphere processing would lead to particularly good memory for the visual details…

Purpose: This study was designed to replicate and extend a previous study of inferencing in which some adults with right hemisphere damage (RHD) generated but did not maintain predictive inferences over time (M. Lehman-Blake & C. Tompkins, 2001). Two hypotheses were tested: (a) inferences were deactivated, and (b) selection of previously generated…

When language learners are exposed to inconsistent probabilistic grammatical patterns, they sometimes impose consistency on the language instead of learning the variation veridically. The authors hypothesized that this regularization results from problems with word retrieval rather than from learning per se. One prediction of this, that easing the…

Several studies of utterance planning and attention processes in stuttering have raised the prospect of working memory involvement in the disorder. In this paper, potential connections between stuttering and two elements of Baddeley's [Baddeley, A. D. (2003). "Working memory: Looking back and looking forward." "Neuroscience," 4, 829-839] working…