Mental rotation, a crucial aspect of spatial cognition, can be improved through repeated practice. However, the long-term effects of combining training with non-invasive brain stimulation and its neurophysiological correlates are not well understood. This study examined the lasting effects of a 10-day mental rotation training with high-definition…

Episodic memories formed during infancy are rapidly forgotten, a phenomenon associated with infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recall early-life memories. In both rats and mice, infantile memories, although not expressed, are actually stored long term in a latent form. These latent memories can be reinstated later in life by certain…

Education leaders need valid metrics to predict students' long-term success. We use a unique data set with cognitive skills, self-regulation, behavior, course performance, and test scores for eighth-grade students from a Northeast school district. We link these data to students' high school outcomes, college enrollment, persistence, and on-time…

Recent work has reported that the insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) promotes memory enhancement. Furthermore, impaired insulin or IGF1 functions have been suggested to play a role in the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration and cognitive impairments, hence implicating the insulin/IGF system as an important target for cognitive enhancement and/or…

Updating information in working memory (WM) is a critical executive function responsible both for continuously replacing outdated information with new relevant data and to suppress or inhibit content that is no longer relevant according to task demands. The goal of the present research is twofold: First, we aimed to study updating development in…

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics…

Growth arrest and DNA damage-inducible [beta] ("Gadd45b") has been shown to be involved in DNA demethylation and may be important for cognitive processes. "Gadd45b" is abnormally expressed in subjects with autism and psychosis, two disorders associated with cognitive deficits. Furthermore, several high-throughput screens have identified "Gadd45b"…

Advantageous decision making progressively develops into early adulthood, most specifically in complex and motivationally salient decision situations in which direct feedback on gains and losses is provided (Figner & Weber, 2011). However, the factors that underlie this developmental improvement in decision making are still not well understood.…

This study focuses on the development of face recognition in typically developing preschool- and school-aged children (aged 5 to 15 years old, "n" = 611, 336 girls). Social predictors include sex differences and own-sex bias. At younger ages, the development of face recognition was rapid and became more gradual as the age increased up…

Challenges the notion that long-term memory retrieval efficiency is a potential source of individual and developmental differences in cognitive functioning. Fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and college-aged subjects participated in a task using the Posner letter matching paradigm and were assessed with tests of verbal and spatial ability. (Author/CB)

In two experiments, the ability of children younger than 20 months to engage in delayed ordered recall was investigated. In the first experiment, 13- and 16-month-old children were presented with 2-step event sequences and tested for recall, first, immediately following the event and second, after a one-week delay. Sequences were novel-causal,…

Cognitive triage is the nonmonotonic relationship between the order in which children read words out of long-term memory and the strength of the memory of the words read. Two experiments with 7 and 12 year olds compared the fuzzy-trace theory with an effortful processing explanation. Findings consistently favored the fuzzy-trace theory's…

A longitudinal study tested the hypothesis that rapid cognitive improvement adversely affects young children's long-term memories encoded prior to cognitive transition. Seventy-one Year One (five- to six-year-old) children were assessed for recall for event and educationally-relevant information and cognitive ability (in operational reasoning) at…

Used path analysis in two experiments to examine possibility that age difference in infants' long-term retention were artifacts of correlated differences in learning rates or learning opportunities. Found that developmental declines in forgetting rates between 12 and 18 months were independent of developmental differences in learning. Age…

Reviews the literature on the relation between early memory development and corresponding changes in brain development of infants. Finds that an adult-like form of explicit memory emerges between 8 and 12 months of age, drawing heavily on limbic and cortical structures. Offers theoretical perspectives for studying the ontogeny of memory. (JW)