Converging evidence suggests that traditional domain-general working memory (WM) training does not have reliable far-transfer effects, but produces reliable, modest near-transfer effects on structurally similar untrained tasks. Given the critical role of WM in academic development, WM training that incorporates task-specific features may maximize…

When young children evaluate their confidence, their monitoring is often overoptimistic, that is, inaccurate. The present study investigated a potential underlying mechanism for kindergarteners' and second graders' overconfidence within a paired associates learning paradigm. We implemented a pre-monitoring phase motivating children to…

Recent studies highlight the important contribution of phonological working memory (PM) in the early stages of both native and foreign language development. However, research on the effects of PM training on language development is very limited. This study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of a PM training educational intervention as a means of…

The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

Background: Rapid automatised naming (RAN) has been found to predict children's reading and arithmetic abilities. However, the underlying mechanisms for its involvement in the two abilities are not clear. This study examines how RAN shared variances with domain-general and domain-specific abilities in predicting reading and arithmetic in Chinese…

This study investigates school-age children's arithmetic operations performance while solving larger-size problems which produces interferences in memory. Complex problems can trigger competing responses in working memory, which are irrelevant to a task goal and increase the likelihood of interference from previously learned problems (De Visscher…

False memories are well established episodic memory phenomena. Recent research in young adults has shown that semantically related associates can be falsely remembered as studied items in working memory (WM) tasks for lists of only a few items when a short 4-second interval was given between study and test. The present study reported two…

This study aims to understand individual differences between children in metacognitive monitoring and control processes and the developmental trajectories of metacognition over one year. Three indicators of procedural metacognition were used: monitoring accuracy (discrimination of confidence judgments between correct and incorrect test responses),…

In this study of more than 1,000 typical and at-risk elementary Arabic-speaking students in Oman, we explore relationships between pragmatic (and other) language skills, literacy, cognition, and behavior and the degree to which demography impacts performance on associated tasks. We found, in most cases, that females performed better than males,…

To investigate the longitudinal effects of two domain-general cognitive abilities, namely verbal working memory and visual search skill, on Chinese reading comprehension. To evaluate whether decoding and linguistic comprehension mediate such effects. A total of 202 first-grade Chinese-speaking children from mainland China (M[subscript]age =…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

The potential benefits and mechanistic effects of working memory training (WMT) in children are the subject of much research and debate. We show that after five weeks of school-based, adaptive WMT 6-9 year-old primary school children had greater activity in prefrontal and striatal brain regions, higher task accuracy, and reduced intra-individual…

The ability to bind, or link, different aspects of an experience in memory undergoes protracted development across childhood. Most studies of memory binding development have assessed extraobject binding between an object and some external element such as another object, whereas little work has examined the development of intraobject binding, such…

Background: According to Munsat (1965, The concept of memory. University of Michigan), a person who makes frequent prospective memory (PM) errors is considered as having a flawed character rather than a bad memory. Given that PM completes its development only in young adulthood, this bias might occur not only within social relationships but also…

As children transition from the early to later grades of elementary school, they become increasingly skilled at employing a variety of techniques -- such as rehearsal and organizational strategies -- for remembering information. Developmental changes in strategy use have been well documented, but little is known about the extent to which these…