By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

The aim of this study is twofold: To examine if deafness is invariably associated with deficits in executive function (EF) and to investigate the relationship between sign language proficiency and EF in deaf children of deaf parents with early exposure to a sign language. It is also the first study of EF in children acquiring Polish Sign Language.…

Few studies have considered bilingualism's impact on cognitive development within the sociolinguistic and cultural context of the immigrant communities where bilingualism is commonly practiced. In the United States, many Mexican-origin bilingual youth practice their bilingual skills by "brokering" (i.e. translating/interpreting between…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine inhibition of irrelevant information in younger and older English monolingual and Spanish--English bilingual adults. Method: Sixty-one participants divided into four groups: 15 younger English monolinguals, 16 younger Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older English monolinguals, and 15 older…

This study investigated whether brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) genotype moderated inhibitory control during an emotionally valenced task in a sample of internationally adopted adolescents (N = 109, ages 12-13 years) who spent their early years in institutional care. Participants were genotyped for the Val66Met polymorphism of the BDNF…

The present study explored the temporal allocation of attention in groups of 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults performing a rapid serial visual presentation task. In a dual-condition task, participants had to detect a briefly presented target (T2) after identifying an initial target (T1) embedded in a random series of…

Research Findings: The present cross-sectional study investigated the question of whether 6 different temperament dimensions (inhibition to novelty, social orientation, motor activity, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and attention) influenced cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) in 168 children (86 three/four-year-olds and 82…

Although memory inhibition seems to underlie retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), there is some controversy about the precise nature of this effect. Because normal RIF is observed in people with deficits in executive control (i.e., older adults), some have proposed that an automatic-like inhibitory process is responsible for the effect. On the…

The goal of this study was to examine the development of attention and response inhibition from ages 5 to 7. Forty children (20 5-year-olds and 20 7-year-olds) completed four counterbalanced phases of a continuous performance task. Phase 1 was designed to measure attention without distraction, Phase 2 was designed to measure attention with…

Three experiments are reported that examined conceptual negative priming effects in children 5 to 12 years of age. Experiment 1 used a negative priming variant of a flanker task requiring the naming of a central color blob flanked by irrelevant distractors. Experiment 2 used a negative priming variant of the Stroop color-word task. Experiment 3…