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…

Background: Developmental research provides considerable evidence of a strong relationship between verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) and mathematics ability across age groups. However, little is known about how components of WM (i.e., short-term storage, processing speed, the central executive) might relate to mathematics sub-categories…

This study examined gene-environment correlation (rGE) in intellectual and academic development in 561 U.S.-based adoptees (57% male; 56% non-Latinx White, 19% multiracial, 13% Black or African American, 11% Latinx) and their birth and adoptive parents between 2003 and 2017. Birth mother intellectual and academic performance predicted adoptive…

Several models of working memory (WM) have been proposed in the literature. Most of the research on the architecture of WM is based on adults or older children, but less is known about younger children. In this study, we tested various models of WM on a sample of 739 Italian children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years, primarily of European…

Objective: The current study examined the association between subjective and objective cognitive measures and alcohol use in college students. Objective cognitive impairment is associated with alcohol use, however subjective cognitive impairment remains understudied in at-risk populations. Participants: Data were collected from 140 undergraduate…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore when and how Mandarin-speaking children use contextual cues to normalize speech variability in perceiving lexical tones. Two different cognitive mechanisms underlying speech normalization (lower level acoustic normalization and higher level acoustic-phonemic normalization) were investigated through the…

The block design task (BDT) is a visuospatial measure that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) perform poorly on. However, it is unclear what underlies their impaired performance. This study investigated whether poorer performance is a result of visuospatial difficulties, executive function (EF) difficulties, atypical looking strategies, or a…

This study compares the achievement of two cohorts of immigrants with ages between 7 and 30 years old. Two sets of participants were assessed in two points in time and in different regions of Portugal. 169 students with similar immigration conditions for this analysis (nationality, length of residence, previous education in the country of origin)…

Self-regulation forms the rudiments for children's academic achievement and socialization. Although one's executive control and verbal skills are needed in both of the core aspects for academic performance: processing to regulate one's own learning and behavior, young students' cognitive capacity for that is still immature influencing the…

Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to rapidly and accurately switch between tasks. It is regarded as a core dimension of executive functions and has been reported to improve during childhood and into early adulthood. For its evaluation, the task-switching paradigm is widely used. Switching between tasks or response sets imposes a series…

An enduring challenge in visual-spatial research has been to identify the factors contributing to individual differences in ability. This research investigated the overall, verbal, and nonverbal visual-spatial ability of 61 (34 boys) three- to five-year-olds (M[subscript age] = 57.3 months; SD = 7.9) and the following factors known to be related…

There are contentious and persistent gender differences reported in some measures of spatial skills, particularly mental rotation and, to a lesser extent, perspective-taking, which may have an impact on mathematics success. Furthermore, pathways between spatial skills and mathematics may be mediated by other cognitive factors, such as fluid…

Understanding gender differences in human cognitive development may contribute to understanding the gender differences in outcomes in cognitive ageing. However, evaluation of this topic has been hindered by a lack of representative, longitudinal data from different aged cohorts measured on the same cognitive tests. Gender differences in cognitive…