One of the most relevant strategies that shapes the education of the citizenry can be found in the formation of a historical consciousness. Yet the very idea of "historical consciousness" as a skill to be taught cannot be taken for granted. In order to disrupt the educational common sense, I will analyze the ways in which historical consciousness…

"Asparagus Racemosus" (AR) is an Ayurvedic rasayana possessing multiple neuropharmacological activities. The adpatogenic and antidepressant activity of AR is well documented. The present study was undertaken to assess nootropic and anti-amnesic activities of MAR in rats. The Morris water maze (MWM) and elevated plus maze (EPM) models were employed…

The diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) requires non-verbal ability to be in the normal range, but little is known regarding the extent to which general reasoning skills are preserved during development. A total of 122 children were tested; 40 SLI, 42 age-matched controls, and 40 younger language-matched controls. Deductive reasoning…

Faces and objects of expertise compete for early perceptual processes and holistic processing resources (Gauthier, Curran, Curby, & Collins, 2003). Here, we examined the nature of interference on holistic face processing in working memory by comparing how various types of loads affect selective attention to parts of face composites. In dual…

A comprehensive analysis of difficulty for multiple-choice items requires information at different levels: the test, the items, and the alternatives. This paper introduces a new parameterization of the nominal categories model (NCM) for analyzing difficulty at these three levels. The new parameterization is referred to as the NE-NCM and is…

We investigated whether focal/nonfocal effects (e.g., Einstein et al., 2005) in prospective memory (PM) are explained by cue differences in monitoring difficulty. In Experiment 1, we show that syllable cues (used in Einstein et al., 2005) are more difficult to monitor for than are word cues; however, initial-letter cues (in words) are similar in…

In 8 recognition experiments, we investigated the "production effect"--the fact that producing a word aloud during study, relative to simply reading a word silently, improves explicit memory. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 showed the effect to be restricted to within-subject, mixed-list designs in which some individual words are spoken aloud at study.…

We compared working memory (WM) for the location of social versus non-social targets in infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (sibs-ASD, n = 25) and of typically developing children (sibs-TD, n = 30) at 6.5 and 9 months of age. There was a significant interaction of risk group and target type on WM, in which the sibs-ASD had…

It has been suggested that learning an object's location relative to (1) intramaze landmarks and (2) local boundaries is supported by parallel striatal and hippocampal systems, both of which rely upon input from a third system for orientation. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of these systems' contributions to spatial…

Memory for objects helps us to determine how we can most effectively and appropriately interact with them. This suggests a tightly coupled interplay between action and background knowledge. Three experiments demonstrate that grasping circumference can be affected by the size of a visual stimulus (Experiment 1), whether that stimulus appears to be…

Previous research has shown that survival-related processing of word lists enhances retention for that material. However, the claim that survival-related memories are more accurate has only been examined when true recall and recognition of neutral material has been measured. In the current experiments, we examined the adaptive memory superiority…

Emotionality is a key component of subjective experience that influences memory. We tested how the emotionality of words affects memory monitoring, specifically, judgments of learning, in both cued recall and free recall paradigms. In both tasks, people predicted that positive and negative emotional words would be recalled better than neutral…

When researchers use the term "mind wandering" for task-unrelated thoughts in signal detection tasks, we may fall into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. Similar negative connotations are attached to common terms like "cognitive failures", "resting state", "rumination", "distraction", "attentional…

"Criminal careers" denotes ways in which offenders develop specialisms and versatility, but studies linking delinquency to social skills deficits have not attempted to explore cognitive, internalised processes by which such "careers" might be chosen. This study investigated criminal minds via script theory: "internal"…

Research Findings: The present study evaluated the impact of a working memory (WM) stimulation program on the development of WM and early literacy skills (ELS) in preschoolers from socioeconomically deprived rural and urban schools in Chile. The sample consisted of 268 children, 144 in the intervention group and 124 in the comparison group. The…