Emotionality as well as cognitive abilities contribute to the acquisition and retrieval of memories as well as to the consolidation of long-term potentiation (LTP), a cellular model of memory formation. However, little is known about the timescale and relative contribution of these processes. Therefore, we tested the effects of weak water maze…

Purpose: An ongoing concern with the evaluation of auditory processing disorders is the extent that assessment instruments are influenced by higher order cognitive functions. This study examined the relationship between verbal working memory and performance on the Test for Auditory Processing Disorders in Children-Revised (SCAN-C; Keith, 2000b) in…

We probed simultaneous French-Spanish bilinguals for the perception of Spanish lexical stress using three tasks, two short-term memory encoding tasks and a speeded lexical decision. In all three tasks, the performance of the group of simultaneous bilinguals was intermediate between that of native speakers of Spanish on the one hand and French late…

This research examined whether variations in salivary measures of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (cortisol) and autonomic nervous system (alpha amylase [sAA]) contribute to individual differences in the association between peer victimization and aggression. Children (N = 132; M age = 9.46 years, SD = 0.33) completed a measure of peer…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an index of self-reported attention deficits predicts the pattern of visual field asymmetries observed in behavioral measures of attention. Studies of "normal" subjects do not present a consistent pattern of asymmetry in attention functions, with some studies showing better left visual field (LVF)…

This study tested the predictions of the revised hierarchical (RHM) and morphological decomposition (MDM) models with Arabic-English bilinguals. The RHM (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) predicts that the amount of activation of first language translation equivalents is negatively correlated with second language (L2) proficiency. The MDM (Frost, Forster, &…

The authors sought to provide an initial evaluation of the hypothesis that corporal punishment is less strongly associated with parental emotion and impulsivity among African American ("Black") in contrast to European American ("White") parents. White-Latino and Black-Latino differences in corporal punishment, emotion, and impulsivity were…

Sustained attention is modulated by the neurotransmitter noradrenaline. The balance of dopamine and noradrenaline in the cortex is controlled by the DBH gene. The principal variant in this gene is a C/T change at position-1021, and the T allele at this locus is hypothesised to result in a slower rate of dopamine to noradrenaline conversion than…

Although a generally positive effect of acute exercise on cognitive performance has been demonstrated, the specific nature of the relationship between exercise-induced arousal and cognitive performance remains unclear. This study was designed to identify the relationship between exercise-induced arousal and cognitive performance for the central…

Despite the fact that categories are often composed of correlated features, the evidence that people detect and use these correlations during intentional category learning has been overwhelmingly negative to date. Nonetheless, on other categorization tasks, such as feature prediction, people show evidence of correlational sensitivity. A…

To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4- to 8-year-olds received tasks of first- and second-order false beliefs and prosocial and self-presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second-order false belief, using social pressures justifications…

Although the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays roles in episodic memory judgments, the specific processes it supports are not understood fully. Event-related potential (ERP) studies of episodic retrieval have revealed an electrophysiological modulation--the right-frontal ERP old/new effect--which is thought to reflect activity in PFC. The functional…

There is a paucity of research examining the relative contribution of the different mechanisms of working memory (short-term storage [STM], processing speed) to children's complex memory span. This study served to replicate and extend the few extant studies that have examined the issue. In this study, the relative contribution of three mechanisms…

This study used traditional behavioral assessment procedures (functional behavioral assessment and structural analysis) in a single-subject design to determine whether a functional relationship existed between (a) levels of task difficulty and teacher attention and (b) off-task behavior in 3 students identified as highly able in mathematics who…

Objective: Changes in reward-related behavior are an important component of normal adolescent affective development. Understanding the neural underpinnings of these normative changes creates a foundation for investigating adolescence as a period of vulnerability to affective disorders, substance use disorders, and health problems. Studies of…