One of the best-established findings in intelligence research is the pattern of positive correlations among various intelligence tests. Although this so-called positive manifold became the conceptual foundation of many theoretical accounts of intelligence, the very nature of it has remained unclear. Only recently, "Process Overlap…

Studies over the past two decades have provided relevant data on the relationship between music and reading abilities although they fundamentally refer to aspects of the first language reading process of young children. The foreign language reading acquisition process of adult learners has, in this sense, been less explored. Research in this area…

The rise of modern architecture styles has strongly impacted the younger generation globally in the current century. This research is designed to study the performance of working memory on understanding Lanna architecture with young adults at a large university in northern Thailand, that of Mae Fah Luang University in Chiang Rai Province,…

Creative thinking shares many characteristics with traditional complex tasks. We investigated whether implicit theories of creativity would affect creative thinking in a way similar to the impact of implicit theories of intelligence on academic tasks. We altered participants' theories of creativity to be either more incremental or more…

A well-known hypothesis in education and amongst the general public is that matching instructional method with an individual's modality-specific learning style improves learning and cognitive performance. Several critical reviews in the past decade, however, have shown that the hypothesis has not been properly evaluated with appropriate…

Memory for numbers improves with age. One source of this improvement may be learning linear spatial-numeric associations, but previous evidence for this hypothesis likely confounded memory span with quality of numerical magnitude representations and failed to distinguish spatial-numeric mappings from other numeric abilities, such as counting or…

Prior research has demonstrated that linguistic skills and knowledge contribute to successful reading acquisition. In contrast, little is known about the influence of domain-general learning abilities on reading. To investigate associations between general memory functions and reading during the early stages of learning to read, performance…

Exposure to 'fake news' can result in false memories, with possible consequences for downstream behaviour. Given the sharp rise in online misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, it is important to understand the factors that influence the development of false memories. The present study measured susceptibility to false memories following…

Research suggests new foreign language (FL) words are learned more easily if their phonology follows the phonotactic rules of the native language. Very little is known, however, about the impact of orthography on FL learning. This study investigated the cognitive mechanisms supporting the learning of words with familiar and unfamiliar…

We examined the role of visuo-spatial working memory in different types of arithmetic ability in children. Previous research had suggested that arithmetic is not a single entity (Dowker, 2005, 2015), and also that visuo-spatial working memory is specifically involved in mathematical cognition (McKenzie et al., 2003) There has, however, been little…

Sight-singing is prevalent in aural skill classes, where learners differ in experience and cognitive abilities. In this research, we investigated whether musical experience, level of study, and working memory capacity (WMC) can predict sight-singing performance and if there is a correlation between WMC and performance among some subgroups of…

Background: Previous research showed a significant association between mathematics and working memory (WM). However, evidence regarding the different effects of verbal and visuospatial WM on mathematical abilities was very limited. Aims: The current research aims to explore the relationship between verbal and visuospatial WM with mathematical…

This Special Issue on linguistic and cognitive development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) arose from the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) (2017), when Jeannette Schaeffer, Stephanie Durrleman, and Inge-Marie Eigsti organized a symposium on this topic. It shows that the study of language development…

Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group…

The present study aimed to examine how visual skills, verbal working memory, visuospatial working memory, and other general cognitive skills (inhibitory control, attention, and decision speed) were simultaneously correlated with the early acquisition of reading among kindergarten children. A total of 99 Chinese children were tested individually on…