Virtual Reality (VR) has made significant inroads into both the consumer and professional sectors. As VR has matured as a technology, its overall practicality for use in education has also increased. However, due to the rapid evolution of the technology, the educational field struggles to stay informed of the latest advancements, changing…

People make inferences about the trustworthiness of others based on their observed gaze behavior. Faces that consistently look toward a target location are rated as more trustworthy than those that look away from the target. Representations of trust are important for future interactions; yet little is known about how they are consolidated in…

Many students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) attending higher education drop out prematurely. The predictive value of self-reported daily executive functioning (EF) and (cognitive) performance-based EF (mental flexibility and working memory) for academic progress was evaluated in 54 young adults with ASD (M[subscript age] = 22.5, SD = 2.4,…

Little is known about the characteristics of academic overachievers, children whose achievement significantly exceeds IQ. Correlates of overachievement (achievement test scores = 1 SD above IQ), nondiscrepant achievement, and learning disability (LD; achievement = 1 SD below IQ) were analyzed in 1,543 children (739 ADHD, 285 autism, and 519…

Recent studies have concluded that children's development of private speech (private speech internalization) is related to and important for developing mathematical ability. In this article, we review a project consisting of studies exploring the cognitive factors that may underlie differences between the use of private speech by children with…

An experiment examined orthographic facilitation of vocabulary learning, that is, whether showing students spellings of novel words during learning helps them remember the words when spellings are no longer present. The purpose was to determine whether having students decode the spellings of vocabulary words improves word learning over passive…

We introduce a methodology for diagramming the ways students use sequences of mental actions to solve mathematical tasks. We studied 12 pre-service teachers as they solved a set of fractions tasks, ranked by cognitive demand. We present the unit transformation graphs for one of those pre-service teachers, to illustrate how she experienced and met…

We examined the relations between working memory, emergent literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, rapid automatized naming), word reading, and listening comprehension to online reading processes (eye movements), and their relations to reading comprehension. A total of 292 students were assessed on working memory and…

Theory of mind has received intensive attention in research as an important skill to develop. Furthermore, recent evidence indicates its role in discourse comprehension. In the current study, we examined the mediating role of theory of mind in the relations of foundational language and cognitive skills (working memory, attentional control,…

Children with ADHD are often described as experiencing deficits in executive function. Two key areas of concern are inhibition, the ability to refrain from a dominant response when needed, and updating, the ability to revise or update incoming information. The purpose of this manuscript is to combine disparate lines of research to help establish a…

This study was designed to investigate the frequency with which students identified as having a Specific Learning Disability (SLD) and a Specific Learning Disability (SLD) combined with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are further assessed for deficits of executive function and working memory. Data were collected and analyzed from…

Holding recently experienced information in mind can help us achieve our current goals. However, such immediate and direct forms of guidance from working memory are less helpful over extended delays or when other related information in long-term memory is useful for reaching these goals. Here we show that information that was encoded in the past…

We investigated processes underlying performance decrements of highly test-anxious persons. Three experiments contrasted conditions that differed in the degree of activation of concepts related to failure. Participants memorized a list of words either containing words related to failure or containing no words related to failure in Experiment 1. In…

The hippocampal formation of the brain plays a crucial role in declarative learning and memory while at the same time being particularly susceptible to environmental influences. Education requires a well-functioning hippocampus, but may also influence the development of this brain structure. Understanding these bidirectional influences may have…

Four experiments tested the forgetting fixation hypothesis of incubation effects, comparing continuous vs. alternating generation of exemplars from three different types of categories. In two experiments, participants who listed as many members as possible from two different categories produced more responses, and more novel responses, when they…