Executive functions (EFs) in early childhood are predictors of later developmental outcomes and school readiness. Much of the research on EFs and their psychosocial correlates has been conducted in high-income, minority world countries, which represent a small and biased portion of children globally. The aim of this study is to examine EFs among…

The potential benefits and mechanistic effects of working memory training (WMT) in children are the subject of much research and debate. We show that after five weeks of school-based, adaptive WMT 6-9 year-old primary school children had greater activity in prefrontal and striatal brain regions, higher task accuracy, and reduced intra-individual…

Executive functions (EFs) are key abilities that allow us to control our thoughts and actions. Research suggests that two EFs, inhibitory control (IC) and working memory (WM), emerge around 9 months. Little is known about IC earlier in infancy and whether basic attentional processes form the "building blocks" of emerging IC. These…

We used two simple unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify differential trajectories of change in children who undergo intensive working memory (WM) training. We used self-organizing maps (SOMs)--a type of simple artificial neural network--to represent multivariate cognitive training data, and then tested whether the way tasks are…

There is a growing need to understand the global impact of poverty on early brain and behavioural development, particularly with regard to key cognitive processes that emerge in early development. Although the impact of adversity on brain development can trap children in an intergenerational cycle of poverty, the massive potential for brain…

Response inhibition is crucial for mental and physical health but studies assessing the trainability of this type of inhibition are rare. Thirty-nine children aged 10-12 years and 46 adults aged 18-24 years were assigned to an adaptive go/no-go inhibition training condition or an active control condition. Transfer of training effects to…

The emergence of strategic verbal rehearsal at around 7 years of age is widely considered a major milestone in descriptions of the development of short-term memory across childhood. Likewise, rehearsal is believed by many to be a crucial factor in explaining why memory improves with age. This apparent qualitative shift in mnemonic processes has…

Literature on the so-called bilingual advantage is directed towards the investigation of whether the mastering of two languages fosters cognitive skills in the non-verbal domain. The present study aimed to evaluate whether the bilingual advantage in non-verbal skills could be best defined as domain-general or domain-specific, and, in the latter…

Improvement in source memory performance throughout development is thought to be mediated by strategic processes that facilitate the retrieval of task-relevant information. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined developmental changes in these processes during adolescence. Adolescents (13-14 years) and adults (19-29 years) completed a…

Fluid intelligence (Gf) predicts performance on a wide range of cognitive activities, and children with impaired Gf often experience academic difficulties. Previous attempts to improve Gf have been hampered by poor control conditions and single outcome measures. It is thus still an open question whether Gf can be improved by training. This study…

The rate at which people process information appears to influence many aspects of cognition across the lifespan. However, many commonly accepted measures of "processing speed" may require goal maintenance, manipulation of information in working memory, and decision-making, blurring the distinction between processing speed and executive…

The present study examined the effects of a 9-month randomized control physical activity intervention aimed at improving cardiorespiratory fitness on changes in working memory performance in preadolescent children relative to a waitlist control group. Participants performed a modified Sternberg task, which manipulated working memory demands based…

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…

To determine the role of configural changes on the development of face encoding and memory, we investigated face recognition in an n-back repetition task with upright, inverted and contrast-reversed unfamiliar faces in adults and children (8-16 years). Repetitions occurred immediately (0-lag) or after one intervening face (1-lag). Face recognition…

We investigated the effect of repetition on recognition of upright, inverted and contrast-reversed target faces in children from 8 to 15 years when engaged in a learning phase/test phase paradigm with target and distractor faces. Early (P1, N170) and late ERP components were analysed. Children across age groups performed equally well, and were…