We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6-13-years old) and 40 young adults (18-24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes.…

Verbally reported long-term memory for past events typically improves with age. However, such findings are based exclusively on studies, where children are directly asked to recall. The present study showed that when 3- (n = 113, 59 girls) and 4-year-olds (n = 113, 62 girls), predominantly White, were brought back to a distinct laboratory-setting…

The accuracy of children's long-term memory for distressing events is of theoretical and legal interest. In this longitudinal study, 3- to 5-year-olds and their main parental caretakers individually participated in a mildly distressing event, and 1 h later the children's memory/suggestibility was assessed (Time 1). Six to seven years later (Time…

Study strategies that learners utilize impact how much they learn. Practicing retrieval from long-term memory (e.g., practice tests or flashcards) is a particularly effective study strategy that can provide large learning benefits; yet, students rarely recognize the benefits of retrieval practice. Here, we examine whether a sample of middle and…

Purpose: Most research examining long-term-memory effects on nonword repetition (NWR) has focused on lexical-level variables. Phoneme-level variables have received little attention, although there are reasons to expect significant sublexical effects in NWR. To further understand the underlying processes of NWR, this study examined effects of…

This is a comparative study that explores preschoolers' English vocabulary acquisition in Taiwan and tries to look for a better pedagogy. After Taiwan's government announced the policy of developing a "Bilingual Nation," English is the second language in Taiwan. The reforming of English instruction is in urgent need. Under this…

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information in working memory (WM) is a critical executive function responsible both for continuously replacing outdated information with new relevant data and to suppress or inhibit content that is no longer relevant according to task demands.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…

The present study explored the origins of word learning in early infancy. Using event-related potentials (ERP) we monitored the brain activity of 3-month-old infants when they were repeatedly exposed to several initially novel words paired consistently with each the same initially novel objects or inconsistently with different objects. Our results…

Are children better than adults in acquiring new skills ("how-to" knowledge) because of a difference in skill memory consolidation? Here we tested the proposal that, as opposed to adults, children's memories for newly acquired skills are immune to interference by subsequent experience. The establishment of long-term memory for a…

Here, we present data demonstrating that a 1 d Morris water maze training protocol is effective at producing stable, long-term spatial memory in both young (3 mo old) and aged (24 mo old) F344xBN rats. Four trials in each of four sessions separated by a 2.5 h ISI produced robust selective search for the platform 1 and 4 d after training, in both…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to test whether a group of older postlingually deafened cochlear implant users (OCIs) use similar verbal memory strategies to those used by older normal-hearing adults (ONHs). Verbal memory functioning was assessed in the visual and auditory modalities separately, enabling us to eliminate possible modality-based…

The purpose of this study was to synthesize the findings from 23 articles that compared the mathematical and cognitive performances of students with mathematics learning disabilities (LD) to (a) students with LD in mathematics and reading, (b) age- or grade-matched students with no LD, and (c) mathematical-ability-matched younger students with no…

Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 and 80 years of age, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory,…

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…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…