Three studies explored whether younger and older adults' free recall performance can benefit from prior exposure to distraction that becomes relevant in a memory task. Participants initially read stories that included distracting text. Later, they studied a list of words for free recall, with half of the list consisting of previously distracting…

The ability to learn a route through a virtual environment was assessed in 19 older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and 40 typically developing (TD) children aged 6-9 years. In addition to comparing route-learning ability across groups, we were interested in whether participants show an adult-like differentiation between "useful"…

Popular reasoning theories postulate that the ability to inhibit inappropriate beliefs lies at the heart of the human reasoning engine. Given that people's inhibitory capacities are known to rise and fall across the lifespan, we predicted that people's deductive reasoning performance would show similar curvilinear age trends. A group of children…