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…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

We determined how various cognitive abilities, including several measures of a proposed domain-specific number sense, relate to mathematical competence in nearly 100 9-year-old children with normal reading skill. Results are consistent with an extended number processing network and suggest that important processing nodes of this network are…

Attention difficulty is associated with poor performance on executive functioning (EF) tasks, yet EF is enhanced in bilingual children. However, no research to date has investigated the possible interaction between bilingualism and attention ability in children to determine the consequences for EF when both are present. We assessed a sample of…

Bilingualism is a typical linguistic experience, yet relatively little is known about its impact on children's cognitive and brain development. Theories of bilingualism suggest that early dual-language acquisition can improve children's cognitive abilities, specifically those relying on frontal lobe functioning. While behavioral findings present…

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this…

Four different age groups (8-9-year-olds, 11-12-year-olds, 13-15-year-olds and young adults) performed a spatial rule-switch task in which the sorting rule had to be detected on the basis of feedback or on the basis of switch cues. Performance errors were examined on the basis of a recently introduced method of error scoring for the Wisconsin Card…