Some recent evidence suggests that mental rotation of characters in children aged 7 or 8 years might be lateralized to the left parietal hemisphere. An alternative statement exists, however, the finding might be completely unspecific for mental rotation but either be simply a function of task difficulty or a consequence of the use of characters as…

This paper examines the role of Working Memory (WM) in developmental reading problems, considering: 1) The operationalization of WM; 2) The unique contribution of WM to reading; 3) Domain-general or -specific explanations of decoding and reading comprehension deficits; and 4) The capacity of WM constructs to distinguish between reading…

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and normal controls were tested in three category learning experiments to determine if previously observed rule-based category learning impairments in PD patients were due to deficits in selective attention or working memory. In Experiment 1, optimal categorization required participants to base their decision on a…

This autoethnography deals with the reflexive nature of conducting ethnography with an elderly woman in an assisted living facility. As the interview progresses, the author, graduate student, and participant are united in a shared memory that transcends the research process. This tale is provided as a means to demonstrate the multilevel horizons…

The statement matching paradigm was used to examine how 10- to 13-year-olds categorized adults when both ethnicity and gender varied across targets. Forty-seven children watched a PowerPoint presentation of a conversation involving two Black men, two Black women, two White men and two White women. Each slide displayed the speaker's picture, name…

Research employing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has frequently shown that learning is impaired in various clinical populations. However, precisely what constitutes "unimpaired" control group learning remains unclear. In order to understand some of the possible factors underlying variability in control group IGT performance, the present study…

This study investigates the compensatory impact of cognitive aids on left and right temporal lobe epileptic patients suffering from verbal memory disorders, who were candidates for surgery. Cognitive aids are defined in the levels-of-processing framework and deal with the depth of encoding, the elaboration of information, and the use of retrieval…

It has been hypothesized that nouns and verbs are processed within relatively separable semantic memory networks. Although abnormal semantic processing is a common feature of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, no prior studies have specifically examined the comparability of noun and verb generation deficits in schizophrenia. In the current study,…

The current study addressed how the timing of interviews affected children's memories of unique and repeated events. Five- to six-year-olds (N = 125) participated in activities 1 or 4 times and were misinformed either 3 or 21 days after the only or last event. Although single-experience children were subsequently less accurate in the 21- versus…

Developmental differences in references to temporal attributes of allegedly experienced events were examined in 250 forensic interviews of 4- to 10-year-old alleged victims of sexual abuse. Children's ages, the specific temporal attributes referenced, and the types of memory tapped by the interviewers' questions significantly affected the quantity…

Human society depends on the ability to remember the actions of other individuals, which is information that must be stored in a temporary buffer to guide behavior after actions have been observed. To date, however, the storage capacity, contents, and architecture of working memory for observed actions are unknown. In this article, the author…

From a behavioral perspective, the CA3a,b subregion of the hippocampus plays an important role in the encoding of new spatial information within short-term memory with a duration of seconds and minutes. This can easily be observed in tasks that require rapid encoding, novelty detection, one-trial short-term or working memory, and one-trial cued…

Memory, suggestibility, stress arousal, and trauma-related psychopathology were examined in 328 3- to 16-year-olds involved in forensic investigations of abuse and neglect. Children's memory and suggestibility were assessed for a medical examination and venipuncture. Being older and scoring higher in cognitive functioning were related to fewer…

Readers may draw knowledge-based inferences to connect sentences in text differently depending on the knowledge domain being accessed. Most prior research has focused on the direction of the causal explanation (predictive vs. backward) without regard to the knowledge domain drawn on to support comprehension. We suggest that less cognitive effort…

A number of studies have found that writers produce text in bursts of language. That is, when creating a text, writers produce a few words, pause, produce a few more words, pause, and so on. Chenoweth and Hayes (2003) hypothesized that language bursts occur when writers translate ideas in to new language. This study tested this hypothesis against…