Purpose: To understand complex expository text, readers often engage in metacognitive comprehension monitoring. Metacognitive monitoring is assumed to rely on basic cognitive abilities (working memory updating, short-term memory, verbal intelligence). These abilities decrease in later adulthood. We thus compared younger and older adults in their…

The architecture of sleep undergoes distinct changes during childhood and early adolescence. Slow wave sleep is involved in memory processing and may support active consolidation of newly encoded representations to support the formation of abstracted "gist" memories. Here, we examined sleep and overnight memory formation in German school…

Bauhaus, the German arts and crafts college, is 100 years old this year. One of the revolutionary features of its pedagogical programme was the methodology of teaching about colour, elaborated by Johannes Itten and Paul Klee, leading Bauhaus masters, and further developed by their disciples, Joseph Albers and György (George) Kepes. This…

This study examined whether age differences in risky decision making are dependent on known probability and value of outcomes (i.e., the expected value [EV]), the valence of anticipated outcomes (gains or losses), and individual differences in working memory and impulsivity. We used a task that varied risk independently from EV so that taking…

In contrast to traditional word spans with verbal recall, recently developed automated tasks employ a visuospatial response format (RF). This RF involves additional cognitive processes such as recoding and visual search, which develop across childhood. The aim of the present study was to extend previous findings on age-dependent RF effects,…

The inconsistency task is used to measure metacognitive monitoring in text comprehension via online (reading time) and offline measures (number of detected inconsistencies). Few studies have examined stability in task performance and interindividual differences. We addressed these issues with adolescents (N = 341) in Grades 6/7 (Mage =…

Several studies have demonstrated that individual differences in processing speed fully mediate the association between age and intelligence, whereas the association between processing speed and intelligence cannot be explained by age differences. Because measures of processing speed reflect a plethora of cognitive and motivational processes, it…

Purpose: This study examined whether monolingual German-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were facilitated by the presence of case-marking cues in their interpretation of German subject and object "welcher" ("which")-questions, as reported for their typically developing peers. We also…

Delay-induced forgetting refers to the finding that memory for studied material typically decreases as the delay between study and test is increased. The results of 3 experiments are reported designed to examine whether this form of forgetting is primarily caused by interference effects or contextual drift effects when people engage in neutral…

In contrast to classical phonological span tasks, which require verbal recall, those used in self-reliant, group-administrable working memory measurement contain a visuospatial response format. As a consequence, these tasks involve recoding, executive, and visual search requirements in addition to encoding and storage processes. To examine…

This study examines the discourse basis for referent accessibility and its relation to the choice of referring expressions by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing children. The aim is to delineate how the linguistic and extra-linguistic context affects referent accessibility to the speaker. The study also examines…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of morphosyntactic cues (case and verb agreement) by children with cochlear implants (CIs) in German which-questions, where interpretation depends on these morphosyntactic cues. The aim was to examine whether children with CIs who perceive the different cues also make use of them…

Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate one's prior knowledge of a fact or event after learning the actual fact. Recent research has suggested that age-related differences in hindsight bias may be based on age-related differences in inhibitory control. We tested whether this explanation held for 3 cognitive processes assumed to underlie…

In Western cultures, life narratives are typically expected to recount the narrator's life from birth to the present. Disparate autobiographical memories need to be integrated into a more or less coherent story, which is facilitated by an overarching temporal macrostructure. The temporal macrostructure consists of elaborated beginnings that…

This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…