Previous research revealed associations between an individual's occupation and cognitive abilities. However, the underlying causal relation is not always clear and only few studies focused on a critical component of executive functioning, namely working memory updating (WMU). Study 1 examined whether restaurant ticket collectors (N = 53) have a…

Understanding the relationship between executive functioning and its connection to working memory and adaptive functioning can inform planning and employment efforts. This study explored the relationship between memory and adaptive functioning with a sample of Autistic youths/young adults. Participant mean age was 21.3 (SD = 3.0). Of the 22…

Plasticity is a neural phenomenon in which experience induces long-lasting changes to neuronal circuits and is at the center of most neurobiological theories of learning and memory. However, too much plasticity is maladaptive and must be balanced with substrate stability. Area CA3 of the hippocampus provides such a balance via hemispheric…

This study aimed to compare cognitive and memory abilities between older adults with and without autism over the age of 50. Twenty-eight individuals with autism and 29 typically developing (TD) older adults took part in the current study. Participants' cognitive and memory abilities were assessed by WAIS-IV and WMS-IV. Older autistic adults were…

Systemic racism can have broad impacts on health in ethnoracial minorities. One way is by suppressing socioeconomic status (SES) levels through barriers to achieve higher income, wealth, and educational attainment. Additionally, the weathering hypothesis proposes that the various stressful adversities faced by ethnoracial minorities lead to…

Older adults often face decline in cognitive resources. How does this impact their decision making--especially under high cognitive demands from concurrent activities? Do older adults' decision processes uniformly decline with increasing mental strain relative to younger adults, or do they compensate for decline by strategically reallocating…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

This study investigated the influence of cognitive ability on bilingual children's vocabulary development in both their languages. Sixty-nine bilingual immigrant children participated, with data collected at three annual intervals. At Time 1, the participants were 5 or 6 years old. Receptive vocabulary was tested in the minority (Turkish, Tarifit)…

Although memory retrieval often enhances subsequent memory, Peterson and Mulligan (2013) reported conditions under which retrieval produces poorer subsequent recall--the negative testing effect. The item-specific--relational account proposes that the effect occurs when retrieval disrupts interitem organizational processing relative to the restudy…

Within the context of complex cognitive processing and educational interventions, Woolfolk (2016) makes reference to problem solving acquisition, problem solving retention, and problem solving transfer. In each of the aforementioned types of problem solving activities, problem identification and problem representation (reflecting procedural…

We investigated processes underlying performance decrements of highly test-anxious persons. Three experiments contrasted conditions that differed in the degree of activation of concepts related to failure. Participants memorized a list of words either containing words related to failure or containing no words related to failure in Experiment 1. In…

Throughout development, working memory is subject to capacity limits that severely constrain short-term storage. However, adults can massively expand the total amount of remembered information by grouping items into "chunks". Although infants also have been shown to chunk objects in memory, little is known regarding the limits of this…

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders, and daily transient feelings of anxiety (or "stress") are ubiquitous. However, the precise impact of both transient and pathological anxiety on higher-order cognitive functions, including short- and long-term memory, is poorly understood. A clearer understanding of the…

Many Flynn effect (FE) studies compare scores across different editions of Wechsler's IQ tests. When construct changes are introduced by the test developers in the new edition, however, the presumed generational effects are difficult to untangle from changes due to test content. To remove this confound, we use the same edition of Wechsler…

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities.…