Background: Life expectancy is on rise and the intriguing question is: When does cognitive decline occur among adults with intellectual disability, compared to adults with typical development? This cross-sectional study examined cognitive performance of crystallised/fluid intelligence, working and long-term memory of adults with intellectual…

We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a…

Previous research with typically developing children and adults shows that active control of the learning experience leads to enhanced episodic memory, as compared with conditions lacking this control. The present study investigates whether similar advantages can be found in children with autism spectrum disorder. In this study, 6-12-year-old…

The current theories suggest the fundamental role of semantic memory in creativity, mediating bottom-up (divergent thinking) and top-down (fluid intelligence) cognitive processes. However, the relationship between creativity, intelligence, and the organization of the semantic memory remains poorly-characterized in children. We investigated the…

Purpose: The current study examined whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), in comparison with typically developing children, perceive and produce gestures to identify nonpresent objects (i.e., referent-identifying gestures), which is crucial for communicating ideas in a discourse. Method: An experimenter described the uses of…

Social mastery motivation and parental response are important correlates of children's vocabulary and self-regulation skills, but little research has examined their relationships collectively. This study investigated the direct relationships among social mastery motivation (active interaction and positive affect frequencies), parental response,…

Sleep plays an active role in memory consolidation. Because children with Down syndrome (DS) and Williams syndrome (WS) experience significant problems with sleep and also with learning, we predicted that sleep-dependent memory consolidation would be impaired in these children when compared to typically developing (TD) children. This is the first…

Background: Research on retelling ability and cognition is limited in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and speech impairment. Aims: To explore the impact of expressive and receptive language, narrative discourse dimensions (Narrative Assessment Profile measures), auditory and visual memory, theory of mind (ToM) and non-verbal cognition on the…

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

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…

Many Flynn effect (FE) studies compare scores across different editions of Wechsler's IQ tests. When construct changes are introduced by the test developers in the new edition, however, the presumed generational effects are difficult to untangle from changes due to test content. To remove this confound, we use the same edition of Wechsler…

Through a review of the literature on mathematical learning disabilities (MLD) and low achievement in mathematics (LA) we have proposed a model classifying mathematical skills involved in learning mathematics into four domains (Core number, Memory, Reasoning, and Visual-spatial). In this paper we present a new experimental computer-based battery…

This article synthesizes the experimental literature that compares the academic, cognitive, and behavioral performance of adults with reading disabilities to those of average-achieving adult readers. The central question posed by this review is to what extent and in what manner do adults with reading disabilities differ from adults without reading…

The paired-associate learning of 52 fourth graders was related to measures of cognitive ability obtained the previous year. Subjects were administered the paired-associate task under one of three variations: at a comfortable rate with standard instructions; at a comfortable rate with a potentially effective learning strategy (visual imagery); and…