The acknowledged high relationship between working memory and intelligence suggests common underlying cognitive mechanisms and, perhaps, shared biological substrates. If this is the case, improvement in working memory by repeated exposure to challenging span tasks might be reflected in increased intelligence scores. Here we report a study in which…

We explored implicit learning in a group of typically developing and developmental dyslexic primary school children (9-12y) using a modified artificial grammar learning task. Performance was calculated using two measures of performance: a perfect free recall (PFR) score and a grammaticality judgment score. Both groups of children required the same…

STEM (an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics) had its origins in the 1990s at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has been used as a generic label for any event, policy, program, or practice that involves one or several of the STEM disciplines. However, a recent survey on the "perception of STEM" found that most…

The capacity to remember sequences is critical to many behaviors, such as navigation and communication. Adult humans readily recall the serial order of auditory items, and this ability is commonly understood to support, in part, the speech processing for language comprehension. Theories of short-term serial recall posit either use of absolute…

Previous research has identified the age prospective memory paradox of age-related declines in laboratory settings in contrast to age benefits in naturalistic settings. Various factors are assumed to account for this paradox, yet empirical evidence on this issue is scarce. In 2 experiments, the present study examined the effect of task setting in…

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are associated with abnormalities in face memory, which evidence suggests has a protracted development through adolescence. The development of face memory in people with and without ASD, from 9 to 29 years old, was examined using the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). Results indicate that the developmental…

Four- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 256) viewed a series of pictures that were covered with occluders to reveal nondescript or identifiable parts. Participants predicted how 3 characters, 1 who had previously viewed the full picture and 2 who had not, would interpret the obstructed drawings. Results showed significant development between 4 and 9…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults with high functioning autism (HFA)/Asperger syndrome (AS) judge others as having as much knowledge about their inner mental states as they do. The current study examined whether this pattern also applies to adolescents with HFA/AS because typically developing adolescents, in contrast to younger…

Delayed matching to sample is typically a two-alternative forced-choice procedure with two sample stimuli. In this task the effects of varying the probability of reinforcers for correct choices and the resulting receiver operating characteristic are symmetrical. A version of the task where a sample is present on some trials and absent on others is…

The present study examined the verbal memory profile and its relation to organizational strategies in high-functioning (Hi-AUT) and low-functioning (Lo-AUT) children with autism. Twenty-two Hi-AUT and 16 Lo-AUT, and 22 age-, gender- and handedness-matched normal children (NC) were required to remember a list of semantically related words for…

This study examines the relationship between learners' production of modified output and their working memory (WM) capacity. The task-based interactions of 42 college-level, native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a foreign language were examined. A relationship was found between learners' WM test scores and their tendency to modify output.…

In recent years, attention has been focused on investigating the effectiveness of composite memory intervention programs with different age and diagnostics groups. The goal of this study was to measure changes in cognitive lapses by Cognitive Failure Questionnaire (CFQ) in a large trained, dementia free group (Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE]…

We investigated the effects of the duration and type of to-be-articulated distractors during encoding of a verbal list into short-term memory (STM). Distractors and to-be-remembered items alternated during list presentation, as in the complex-span task that underlies much of working-memory research. According to an interference model of STM, known…

A substantial amount of research has been conducted in an effort to understand the impact of short-term (less than 48 hr) total sleep deprivation (SD) on outcomes in various cognitive domains. Despite this wealth of information, there has been disagreement on how these data should be interpreted, arising in part because the relative magnitude of…

Item responses to Digit Span and Letter-Number Sequencing were analyzed to develop a better-refined model of the two working memory tasks using the finite mixture (FM) modeling method. Models with ordinal latent traits were found to better account for the independent sources of the variability in the tasks than those with continuous traits, and…