Adults remember items with shared contexts as occurring closer in time to one another than those associated with different contexts, even when their objective temporal distance is fixed. Such temporal memory biases are thought to reflect within-event integration and between-event differentiation processes that organize events according to their…

Relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words. In adults, recent experiments have shown that intrinsic reward signals accompany successful word learning from context. In addition, the experience of reward facilitated long-term memory for words. In adolescence, developmental changes are seen in reward and motivation…

The ability to prioritize remembering explicitly valuable information is termed value-based remembering. Critically, the processes and contexts that support the development of value-based remembering are largely unknown. The present study examined the effects of feedback and metacognitive differences on value-based remembering in predominantly…

Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

In 2020, 21.5% of US preschoolers spoke a language other than English at home. These children transition into English-speaking classrooms in different ways, often handling foundational concepts in two languages. Critically, some knowledge may be dependent on the language of learning. For instance, both bilingual children and adults typically…

Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU)…

Some forms of abuse, such as domestic violence, tend to occur repeatedly. Although memory for repeated events has received considerable empirical attention, most of this research has used a child sample. Experiments that have examined adult repeated-event memory tend to use vastly different methodological paradigms to that used for children. To…

The current experiment examined the effect of forewarning on children's (11 to 12 years of age) and adults' spontaneous false memory creation by presenting participants with semantically related word lists that are often used to elicit false memories (i.e., Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm). The forewarning consisted of an explanation of…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in…

This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

Autobiographical remembering develops in childhood. A late-developing cognitive tool is the cultural life script. The present study aimed at exploring the beginnings of its acquisition and at replicating its acquisition in early adolescence in a Southern-European culture. Study 1 established the Portuguese normative adult cultural life script,…

Adults with posttraumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma (ch-PTSD) described their 'worst' traumatic event (a single or repeated event) pre-post treatment for PTSD during an international clinical trial. The memory reports were coded for specificity ("Episodic" vs. "General") and level of detail. Repeated event (RE)…

Working memory and recognition memory develop across adolescence, but the relationship between them is not fully understood. We investigated associations between n-back task performance and subsequent recognition memory in a community sample (8-30 yr, n = 150) using tasks from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study) to…