This research investigates whether a short mindfulness exercise can reduce children's psychophysiological stress reactions in the face of a performance task. To answer the question, a randomized controlled trial with 106 elementary school children, aged between 5 and 11 years, was conducted. An intervention group completed a two-minute breathing…

Individual differences in executive function (EF) are well established to be related to mathematics achievement, yet the mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood. Comparing representations (problems, solutions, concepts) is central to mathematical thinking, and relational reasoning is known to rely upon EF resources. The current…

This study examined the independent and mediated associations between maternal depression symptoms (MDS), mother-child interaction, and child executive function (EF) in a prospective longitudinal sample of 1,037 children (50% boys) from predominantly low-income and rural communities. When children were 6, 15 and 24 months of age, mothers reported…

The day-night paradigm, where children respond to a pair of pictures with opposite labels for a series of trials, is a widely used measure of interference control. Recent research has shown that a happy-sad variant of the day-night task was significantly more difficult than the standard day-night task. The present research examined whether the…