Learning behavioural responses and adapting them based on feedback is crucial from a young age, continuing to develop into young adulthood. This study examines the development trajectory and contributing factors from childhood to adulthood using a reversal learning paradigm. We tested 202 participants aged 10 to 22 in an online study, where they…

Recent studies using the diffusion decision model find that performance across many cognitive control tasks can be largely attributed to a task-general efficiency of evidence accumulation (EEA) factor that reflects individuals' ability to selectively gather evidence relevant to task goals. However, estimates of EEA from an n-back "conflict…

As a novel approach to conceptualizing executive functions, this study applied network analysis to a common battery of executive function tests administered to a sample covering the life span. Participants (N = 3,944; age: M = 20.8 years, SD = 19.6, range: 3-85; maternal/self education: M = 12.9 years, SD = 2.6; 53.3% girls/women, 46.7% boys/men;…

Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African…

Purpose: We investigated developmental differences in a dual task involving rhyming and tone judgment/decisions and the effects of varying cognitive demands on task performance. Method: Participants were 7- to 11-year-olds, 12- to 15-year-olds, and adults between 18 and 40 years (n = 19 per group). The rhyming task consisted of three stimuli…

Doctoral-level graduate training is, by definition, very demanding from a cognitive perspective. As graduate students adjust to the significant academic demands of doctoral education, they are often in a period of financial, personal, and relational flux or challenge. In addition to what are likely more obvious social and emotional effects,…

Purpose: This study examined whether children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) could use distributional information in an artificial language to learn about grammatical category membership similarly to their typically developing (TD) peers and whether developmental differences existed within and between DLD and TD groups.…

Technology is ubiquitous and takes many forms. Digital media consumption (e.g., television, video games, etc.) has increased significantly in its prevalence in our lives as well as in social acceptability. However, it has also been consistently implicated in poorer health outcomes. The extent to which cognitive functions are adversely affected by…

This article presents three studies, two of them longitudinal, which investigated the relations between age, processing speed, working memory (WM), and fluid intelligence ("g[subscript f]") from 4 to 16 years of age. Structural equation modeling showed that speed was a powerful covariate of age ([approximately] - 0.6 to - 0.7) from 4 to 13 years,…

Several models assume that working memory development depends on age-related increases in efficiency and speed of processing. However, age-related increases in the efficiency of the mechanisms that counteract forgetting and restore memory traces may also be important. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments by manipulating both the…

The goal of the present study was to test opposing views about 4 issues concerning predictors of individual differences in Chinese written composition: (a) whether morphological awareness, syntactic processing, and working memory represent distinct and measureable constructs in Chinese or are just manifestations of general language ability; (b)…

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…

Although visuospatial short-term memory tasks have been found to engage more executive resources than do their phonological counterparts, it remains unclear whether this is due to intrinsic differences between the tasks or differences in participants' experience with them. The authors found 11-year-olds' performances on both visual short-term and…

This study investigated the structure and development of processes involved in "g." One hundred and forty children, about equally drawn among primary school grades 1-6 were examined by four types of Stroop-like speeded tasks addressed to processes of increasing complexity (i.e., speed of processing, perceptual discrimination, perceptual control,…

A longitudinal study examined memory span at 5, 7, and 12 months in full-term and low-birth-weight preterm infants. Findings were similar for both groups: longer spans were more difficult, especially at younger ages, memory capacity increased over first year of life, there was marked recency effect for spans of 3 and 4 at all ages, and modest…