The European Smoking Prevention Framework Approach (ESFA) study in six countries tested the effects of a comprehensive smoking prevention approach after 24 (T3; N = 10751) and 30 months (T4; N = 9282). The programme targeted four levels, i.e. adolescents in schools, school policies, parents and the community. In Portugal, 12.4% of the T1…

Recent research has drawn attention to the way in which during the years of secondary schooling pupils move away from the literal acceptance of biblical narratives to the rejection of these narratives. The Loman Accelerated Symbolic Thinking programme is designed to offer pupils the third option of accepting a symbolic interpretation of biblical…

Background: Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with fronto-striatal dysfunction. There is debate as to the extent to which TS is associated with cognitive impairment. Some authors argue that any impairments seen are attributable to comorbid psychiatric symptomatology, whilst others have suggested that…

Background: Patterns of low heart rate, skin conductance and cortisol seem to characterise children with disruptive behaviour disorder (DBD). Until now, the startle paradigm has not been used in DBD children. We investigated whether DBD children, like adult psychopaths, process emotional stimuli in an abnormal way. Method: Twenty-one DBD and 33…

Non-word repetition, in which participants hear and repeat unfamiliar verbal stimuli, is thought to provide a particularly sensitive measure of verbal short-term memory capacity. However, performance on this task can also be constrained by hearing and speech production skills, and by an individuals' linguistic knowledge. This study examined real…

The existence and effects of lead poisoning continue to plague young children and their families, particularly children in older inner city neighborhoods. A task force in South Bend, Indiana, developed a parental education program which was implemented at an inner city elementary school. The program involved parent education, events for the…

Mathematical problem solving is a transfer challenge requiring children to develop schemas for recognizing novel problems as belonging to familiar problem types for which they know solutions. Schema-based transfer instruction (SBTI) explicitly teaches transfer features that change problems in superficial ways to make them appear novel even though…

Metacognitive reading strategies were trained and practiced using interactive Web-based tools. Twenty middle school poor reading comprehenders were trained in two metacognitive strategies using a Web-based application called 3D-Readers. The training texts were science-oriented and merged the narrative and expository genres. Results from a…

A meta-analysis in the form of Brinley plots was conducted on the mean reaction times of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Control groups of children and adolescents on the Stroop Color and Word Test (SCWT). ADHD reaction times were regressed on Control group reaction times for 17 data sets (accessed from 13 published studies).…

The authors previously showed that dietary cytidine (5')-diphosphocholine (CDP-choline) supplementation could protect against the development of memory deficits in aging rats. In the present study, younger rats exposed to impoverished environmental conditions and manifesting hippocampal-dependent memory impairments similar to those observed in the…

The effects of stress (restraint plus tail shock) on hippocampus-dependent trace eyeblink conditioning and hippocampal excitability were examined in C57BL/6 male mice. The results indicate that the stressor significantly increased the concentration of circulating corticosterone, the amount and rate of learning relative to nonstressed conditioned…

Permanent lesions in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) affect acquisition of conditioned responses (CRs) during trace eyeblink conditioning and retention of remotely acquired CRs. To clarify further roles of the mPFC in this type of learning, we investigated the participation of the mPFC in mnemonic processes both during and after daily…

We examine the visual processing of high-functioning adults with developmental dyslexia (mean Performance IQ=126.5) and current phonological problems. In comparison to an age- and IQ-matched control group, the group with dyslexia showed deficits in two tasks associated with magnocellular/dorsal pathway function. For the "frequency doubling"…

The effects of age of acquisition and native language prosody on the acquisition of English stress patterns were investigated with early and late Korean-English bilinguals (n = 20). Distributional patterns of stress placement based on syllabic structure, distributional patterns of stress placement based on lexical class, and stress patterns of…

We investigated the role of executive and spatial representational processes in impaired performance of block construction tasks by children with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic defect that results in severely impaired spatial cognition. In Experiment 1, we examined performance in two kinds of block construction tasks, Simple Puzzles, in…