While visual working memory has a short lifetime, residual representations can persist and disrupt currently maintained information. This phenomenon is known as proactive interference (PI), and the present study investigated whether the representations underpinning item-specific PI lose details over time. This would be expected if the memories…

Natural environments provide a rich spatiotemporal context that allows for visual objects to be differentiated based on different types of information: their absolute or relative spatial or temporal coordinates, or their ordinal positions in a spatial or temporal sequence. Here, we investigated which spatial and temporal properties are…

Although working memory (WM) is usually defined as a cognitive system coordinating processing and storage in the short term, in most WM models, memory aspects have been developed more fully than processing systems, and many studies of WM tasks have tended to focus on memory performance. The present study investigated WM functioning without…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have deficits in verbal and non-verbal processing relative to typically developing (TD) peers, potentially reflecting difficulties in working memory, processing speed and inhibition of interference. We examined working memory in children with DLD using the…

Successful language comprehension requires the rapid deployment of working memory resources alongside the capacity to predict upcoming linguistic input. While previous research views these as competing factors, this dissertation explores a unified theory of processing complexity and evaluates the interaction between memory and prediction. The…

Efforts to increase moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in school-age children are associated with improved health, cognitive, and academic outcomes. However, questions remain about whether similar benefits are observed in early childhood. We hypothesized that motor competence, not MVPA, would be related to improved cognitive and…

Efforts to increase moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in school-aged children are associated with improved health, cognitive, and academic outcomes. However, questions remain about whether similar benefits are observed in early childhood. We hypothesized that motor competence, not MVPA, would be related to improved cognitive and…

Eight experiments (N = 2,003) assessed the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and performance on the antisaccade task. Experiments 1-5 and 7 examined individual differences in aspects of goal management processes occurring during the preparatory delay of the antisaccade task. WMC tended to interact with delay interval suggesting that…

There is a long-standing debate over whether the passage of time causes forgetting from working memory, a process called trace decay. Researchers providing evidence against the existence of trace decay generally study memory by presenting familiar verbal memory items for 1 s or more per memory item, during the study period. In contrast,…

Using a path analytic approach with a sample of Norwegian undergraduate readers, we investigated the effects of behavioral engagement on text comprehension as reflected in students' post-reading written reports on the topic in question. Results indicated that the behavioral engagement components of writing time and the length of the written…

The testing effect occurs when students, given information to learn and then practice during a test, perform better on a subsequent content post-test than students who restudy the information as a substitute for the practice test. The effect is often weaker or reversed if immediate rather than delayed post-tests are used. The weakening may be due…

Perineuronal nets (PNNs) are specialized extracellular matrix structures that surround subsets of neurons throughout the central nervous system (CNS). They are made up of chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs), hyaluronan, tenascin-R, and many other link proteins that together make up their rigid and lattice-like structure. Modulation of PNNs…

In the present meta-analysis, we systematically investigated the relative contributions of students' initial mathematics, reading, and cognitive skills on subsequent mathematics performance measured at least 3 months later. With one-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling, we conducted analyses based on 580,437 students from 265…

For a long time, Cognitive Load Theory has considered working memory models as tools to advance research on learning. It has used working memory capacity models, where working memory is viewed as being composed of a discrete number of slots (i.e., chunks) that can be kept active. However, recent results have shown that for a fixed quantity of…

In educational research, interesting but irrelevant materials are often considered seductive details, which are suspected to have detrimental effects on learning. Although seductive details have been mostly examined in the context of text comprehension, such elements are also used in graphs (e.g., depicting data points). In the present experiment,…