Two experiments examined whether text composition engages verbal, visual, and spatial working memory to different degrees. In Experiment 1, undergraduate students composed by longhand a persuasive text while performing a verbal, visual, or spatial concurrent task that was presented visually. In Experiment 2, participants performed a verbal or…

The main objective in the present study is to examine the effect of gender on primary school students' construction of elaborative backward inferences during text processing. A total of 333 children, aged 10-11 years (n = 158 girls and 175 boys) participated in the study. Each participant completed a backward inference test. The results indicate…

The prion protein Met129Val polymorphism has recently been related to human long-term memory with carriers of either the 129[superscript MM] or the 129[superscript MV] genotype recalling 17% more words than 129[superscript VV] carriers at 24 h following learning. Here, we sampled genotype differences in retrieval-related brain activity at 30 min…

Recent psychological and neuropsychological research suggests that executive functions--the cognitive control processes that regulate thought and action--are multifaceted and that different types of executive functions are correlated but separable. The present multivariate twin study of 3 executive functions (inhibiting dominant responses,…

The effects of environmental stimulation and parental nurturance on brain development have been studied extensively in animals. Much less is known about the relations between childhood experience and cognitive development in humans. Using a longitudinally collected data set with ecologically valid in-home measures of childhood experience and later…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

Malay is an alphabetic language with transparent orthography. A Malay reading-related assessment battery which was conceptualised based on the International Dyslexia Association definition of dyslexia was developed and validated for the purpose of dyslexia assessment. The battery consisted of ten tests: Letter Naming, Word Reading, Non-word…

This study investigates the personal communication memories and experiences of adult deaf people during their childhoods in their homes. In order to obtain relevant information in depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty four Cypriot deaf individuals between the ages of 19 to 54 years with different family and school…

Memory and attentional control impairments are the two most common forms of dysfunction following mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) and lead to significant morbidity in patients, yet these functions are thought to be supported by different brain networks. This 3 T magnetic resonance diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study investigates whether…

This longitudinal study was designed to (a) examine changes in children's deliberate memory across the 1st grade; (b) characterize the memory-relevant aspects of their classrooms; and (c) explore linkages between the children's performance and the language their teachers use in instruction. To explore contextual factors that may facilitate the…

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be…

Sight reading is a functional skill which is essential for all musicians involved in particular fields of western classical music culture. In the last decade, expertise theory has shown that time spent on activities is a good predictor for later achievement in a domain. However, this study is based on the hypothesis that general and elementary…

This study outlines the construction of a tool to enhance the competence of foreign language teachers in estimating the effectiveness of language-learning tasks. Five assumptions basic to second-language acquisition are crucial to the design of the tool. Subsequently, drawing on insights from cognitive psychology about information-processing, a…

Derived changes in genes associated with primary microcephaly (MCPH) have been suggested to be "currently sweeping to fixation" i.e., increasing in frequency in most populations, with the likely outcome that the derived allele will completely displace the ancestral allele over time. Possible causes for this sweep include effects on human reasoning…

Two studies of the formation of pupils' subjectivities within the Danish school and educational system in the period 1945-2005 create the framework for a methodological discussion of how subjectivities in educational history can be studied. Both studies use qualitative interviews as a way of studying subject formations in educational history. This…