Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

This study examined whether school-aged autistic children without co-occurring intellectual disabilities (autisticWoID) show similar difficulty on Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks as young autisticWoID children and if these difficulties are related to problems in domain-general aspects of cognition. Eighty-one autisticWoID and 44 neurotypical (NT)…

Background: Problem-solving in early and middle childhood is of high relevance for cognitive developmental research and educational support. Previous research on science problem-solving has focussed on the process and strategies of children handling challenging tasks, but less on providing insights into the cognitive network that enables science…

Cognitive load occurs when the demands of a task surpass the available processing capacity, straining mental resources and potentially impairing performance efficiency, such as increasing the number of errors in a task. Owing to its ubiquity in real-world scenarios, the existence of offloading strategies to reduce cognitive load is not new to…

We tested whether second language (L2) learners rely more on explicit memory during structural priming at lower than at higher proficiency levels (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017). We compared within-L2 priming with lexical overlap in 100 low and 100 high proficiency French L2 speakers under low versus high working memory load conditions induced…

Learning with games requires two types of information, namely domain-specific information and game-specific information. Presenting these two types of information together with gameplay may pose a heavy demand on cognitive resources. This study investigates how timing of information presentation affects cognition (ie, mental effort and…

Cognitive demand is a crucial dimension of instructional quality. Its heterogenous operationalizations call for refined investigations, with respect to discursive richness (generic conceptualizations) and conceptual richness (subject-related conceptualizations). Considering not only teachers' intended cognitive activation (operationalized, e.g.,…

The Useful Field of View task (UFOV) is a strong and reliable predictor of crash risk in older drivers. However, while the functional domain of attention is clearly implicated in UFOV performance, the potential role of one specific attentional process remains unclear: attentional breadth (the spatial extent of the attended region around the point…

Healthy aging often entails a decline in cognitive and motor functions, affecting independence and quality of life in older adults. Brain stimulation shows potential to enhance these functions, but studies show variable effects. Previous studies have tried to identify responders and non-responders through correlations between behavioral change and…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Intra-individual response time variability (IIRTV) during cognitive performance is increasingly recognized as an important indicator of attentional control (AC) and related brain region function. However, what determinants contribute to preschoolers' IIRTV received little attention. The present study explored the interaction of dopaminergic…

This study investigates school-age children's arithmetic operations performance while solving larger-size problems which produces interferences in memory. Complex problems can trigger competing responses in working memory, which are irrelevant to a task goal and increase the likelihood of interference from previously learned problems (De Visscher…

Background: When watching educational online videos, learners need to determine whether the videos' contents are suitable for learning. Whereas this may induce metacognitive monitoring processes, it may also distract learners from the learning materials. Objectives: In the current set of experiments, we investigated whether asking participants to…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

To investigate the longitudinal effects of two domain-general cognitive abilities, namely verbal working memory and visual search skill, on Chinese reading comprehension. To evaluate whether decoding and linguistic comprehension mediate such effects. A total of 202 first-grade Chinese-speaking children from mainland China (M[subscript]age =…