This article seeks to substantiate the need for the prognostic assessment of the degree to which school students are prepared to master new types of activity, which underlie their design of an individual learning route at an appropriate senior stage of learning. The authors discuss the concept of project competence as an integral characteristic of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to report how "verbal rehearsal speed" (VRS), a form of covert speech used to maintain verbal information in working memory, and another verbal processing speed measure, perceptual encoding speed, are related to 3 domains of executive function (EF) at risk in cochlear implant (CI) users: verbal…

Self-regulation is the ability to control one's thoughts, actions, and emotions. When children are better able to follow directions or control impulses they are better prepared for school and for life. Sesame Workshop has and continues to create rich, meaningful content that places self-regulation skills and the strategies needed for school…

Children typically hold very optimistic views of their own skills but so far, only a few studies have investigated possible correlates of the ability to predict performance accurately. Therefore, this study examined the role of individual differences in performance estimation accuracy as a global metacognitive index for different monitoring and…

The study investigated sequence learning from stochastic feedback in boys with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developed (TD) boys. We asked boys with ASD from Nigeria and the UK as well as age- and gender-matched controls (also males only) to deduce a sequence of four left and right button presses, LLRR, RRLL, LRLR, RLRL, LRRL and…

Cognitive research proposes that social cognition (SC), executive functions (EF) and local processing style (weak CC) may be fruitful areas for research into the familial-genetic underpinnings of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The performance of 140 children with ASD, 172 siblings and 127 controls on tasks measuring SC (face recognition,…

Reading-impaired children have difficulty tapping to a beat. Here we tested whether this relationship between reading ability and synchronized tapping holds in typically-developing adolescents. We also hypothesized that tapping relates to two other abilities. First, since auditory-motor synchronization requires monitoring of the relationship…

The aim of this study was to examine unique and common causes of problems in reading and arithmetic fluency. 13- to 14-year-old students were placed into one of five groups: reading disabled (RD, n = 16), arithmetic disabled (AD, n = 34), reading and arithmetic disabled (RAD, n = 17), reading, arithmetic, and listening comprehension disabled…

The complex interplay of education, age, and cognitive performance on various neuropsychological tests is examined in the current study. New education indices were formulated and further investigated to reveal how age and education variances work together to account for performance on neuropsychological tests. Participants were 830…

Executive functions enable children to pay attention, follow instructions, apply what they have learned, have those "aha!" moments in which they grasp how multiple facts interrelate, think of creative solutions, obey social norms such as waiting their turn and not butting in line or jumping out of their seat, mentally construct a plan,…

Diminished episodic memory and diminished use of semantic information to aid recall by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are both thought to result from diminished relational binding of elements of complex stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we asked high-functioning adults with ASD and typical comparison participants to study grids in…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties in theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF), which may be linked because one domain (EF) affects the other (ToM). Group differences (ASD vs. typical development) were examined in both cognitive domains, as well as EF's associations and regressions with ToM. Participants…

Although early studies of executive functioning in children supported Miyake et al.'s (2000) three-factor model, more recent findings supported a variety of undifferentiated or two-factor structures. Using a cohort-sequential design, this study examined whether there were age-related differences in the structure of executive functioning among…

We investigated the causal role of executive control functions in the production of brief time intervals by means of a concurrent task paradigm. To isolate the influence of executive functions on timing from motor coordination effects, we dissociated executive load from the number of effectors used in the dual task situation. In 3 experiments,…

The influences of verbal mental age (VMA) and performance mental age (PMA) on cognitive flexibility were examined among a group of participants with Down syndrome (DS), in order to disentangle the relative contributions of each. The impaired cognitive flexibility typically observed among individuals with DS in combination with uneven VMA and PMA…