Memory performance predictions are subjective estimates of possible memory task performance. The purpose of this study was to examine possible factors related to changes in word list performance predictions made by younger and older adults. Factors included memory self-efficacy, actual performance, and perceptions of performance. The current study…

Poor sleep is a common feature in autism even though patients themselves do not necessarily complain. The impact of poor sleep on daytime cognitive functioning in autism is not well-known and we therefore investigated whether sleep in autism correlates with daytime cognitive performance. A battery of non-verbal tasks was administered, in the…

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals…

Summed-similarity models of short-term item recognition posit that participants base their judgments of an item's prior occurrence on that item's summed similarity to the ensemble of items on the remembered list. We examined the neural predictions of these models in 3 short-term recognition memory experiments using electrocorticographic/depth…

Motor affordances have been shown to play a role in visual object identification and categorization. The present study explored whether working memory is likewise supported by motor affordances. Use of motor affordances should be disrupted by motor interference, and this effect should be larger for objects that have motor affordances than for…

We present a theoretical framework and a simplified simulation model for the co-evolution of knowledge and event memory, both termed SARKAE (Storing and Retrieving Knowledge and Events). Knowledge is formed through the accrual of individual events, a process that operates in tandem with the storage of individual event memories. In 2 studies, new…

This study used a lesson unit of an academic subject to understand the quantity and quality of college students' in-class and after-class lecture notes, and to explore the effects of note quantity and quality on academic performance. Thirty-eight freshmen students of a general psychology class in a university in southern Taiwan were recruited as…

Several researchers have hypothesized a deficit in memory processing to exist in children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This hypothesis has been supported by findings of deficient recall and recognition ability in children with ASD. Specifically, research has pointed to greater deficits in their ability to recall events…

Digital reading as superficial reading is examined by demonstrating that technologies act as placeholders for different types of memory, artificial memory and true memory. This chapter argues that the affordances of digital technologies enable certain types of reading activity, digital reading, but hinders others, such as deep reading. In…

The purpose of this body of work was to gain a clearer understanding of the potential cognitive factors that may contribute to Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This study attempted to simulate a performance profile of SLI in typically developing children within a grammaticality judgment task, featuring structures historically difficult (third…

Patients with writer's cramp present sensory and representational abnormalities relevant to motor control, such as impairment in the temporal discrimination between tactile stimuli and in pure motor imagery tasks, like the mental rotation of corporeal and inanimate objects. However, only limited information is available on the ability of patients…

In the syntax literature, it is commonly assumed that a constraint on linguistic competence blocks extraction of "wh-"expressions (e.g. "what" or "which book") from embedded questions, referred to as "wh-"islands. Furthermore, it is assumed that there is an argument/adjunct asymmetry in extraction from "wh-"islands. We report results from two…

This study investigated the effects of hearing status and age of signed language acquisition on signed language working memory capacity. Professional Auslan (Australian sign language)/English interpreters (hearing native signers and hearing nonnative signers) and deaf Auslan signers (deaf native signers and deaf nonnative signers) completed an…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

Forty native Spanish-speaking children (age 8;0-10;3), 20 with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and 20 with Typical Language Development (TLD), received a battery of psycholinguistic tests, IQ, hearing screenings, and the Spanish Non-word Repetition Task (NRT). The children's repetition of 20 non-words was scored. The percentage of correct…