Attachment Theory has received increasing interest as a framework allowing for a more refined understanding of the potential consequences of early relational trauma on psychological and social adjustment. Research has provided support for the role of disorganized attachment, both as a sequela of traumatic experiences and as a risk factor for…

The highly regular orthographies (spelling systems) of many nations expedite literacy development, and their children experience a rapid transition from early literacy (learning to read and write) to sophisticated literacy (reading and writing to learn). In contrast, English orthographic complexity impedes literacy development, particularly for…

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the role played by basic numerical magnitude processing in the typical and atypical development of mathematical skills. In this context, tasks measuring both the intentional and automatic processing of numerical magnitude have been employed to characterize how children's representation and…

Self-regulation represents a core aspect of human functioning that influences positive development across the life span. This chapter focuses on the action-control model, a key facet of self-regulation during childhood and early adolescence. The authors discuss the development of action-control beliefs, paying particular attention to their…

Signal detection theory forms the core of many current models of cognition, including memory, choice, and categorization. However, the classic signal detection model presumes the a priori existence of fixed stimulus representations--usually Gaussian distributions--even when the observer has no experience with the task. Furthermore, the classic…

Although motivation and cognition are often examined separately, recent theory suggests that a delay-averse motivational style may negatively impact development of executive functions (EFs), such as working memory (WM) and response inhibition (RI) for children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD; Sonuga-Barke, 2002). This model…

Studies of children's knowledge of the Earth have led to very different conclusions: some appear to show that children construct their own, non-scientific "theories" (mental models) of the flat, hollow or dual Earth. Others indicate that many young children have some understanding of the spherical (scientific) Earth, and that their…

Building intelligent tutoring systems presents significant challenges -- one challenge arises because tutoring is concerned with unobservable inner workings of the human brain; another results from the formidable task of knowledge representation and reasoning; still a third is due to the competing theories of teaching and learning. Over the past…

The initial state parameters s[subscript 0] and w[subscript 0] are intricate issues of the averaging cognitive models in Information Integration Theory. Usually they are defined as a measure of prior information (Anderson, 1981; 1982) but there are no general rules to deal with them. In fact, there is no agreement as to their treatment except in…

Learning through repetition is a fundamental form and also an effective method of language learning critical for achieving proficient and automatic language use. Massive repetition priming as a common research paradigm taps into the dynamic processes involved in repetition learning. Research with this paradigm has so far used only emotionally…

Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based problems, those present in ancestral environments,…

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the…

Actin rearrangement plays an essential role in learning and memory; however, the spatial and temporal regulation of actin dynamics in different phases of associative memory has not been fully understood. Here, using the conditioned taste aversion (CTA) paradigm, we investigated the region-specific involvement of actin rearrangement-related…

Theta burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (TBS) is considered to produce plastic changes in human motor cortex. Here, we examined the inhibitory and excitatory effects of TBS on implicit sequence learning using a probabilistic serial reaction time paradigm. We investigated the involvement of several cortical regions associated with implicit…

Early on during word recognition, letter positions are not accurately coded. Evidence for this comes from transposed-letter (TL) priming effects, in which letter strings generated by transposing two adjacent letters (e.g., "jugde") produce large priming effects, more than primes with the letters replaced in the corresponding position (e.g.,…