Objectives: Previous studies have widely demonstrated that inhibition of return (IOR) with audiovisual targets decreases due to audiovisual integration (AVI). It is currently unclear, however, whether the impaired AVI in children with ADHD has effects on IOR. The present study used the cue-target paradigm to explore differences between the IOR of…

Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive…

The ability to extract patterns from sensory input across time and space is thought to underlie the development and acquisition of language and literacy skills, particularly the subdomains marked by the learning of probabilistic knowledge. Thus, impairments in procedural learning are hypothesized to underlie neurodevelopmental disorders, such as…

Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils' motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9-11 years. Children…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

For this study, 11 children with moderate to severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were given directives containing prepositions in three cue conditions: (a) spoken alone, (b) a short video clip along with spoken cues, and (c) a sequence of three graphic symbols accompanied by spoken cues. Participants followed directives significantly more…

This study investigated in a longitudinal design how 74 Dutch children with dyslexia and 39 typically developing peers differed in sequential versus spatial implicit learning and overnight consolidation, and it examined whether implicit learning related to (pseudo)word reading development in Grades 5 and 6. The results showed that sequential, but…

Gifted children are described as very talented children who achieve more than their age mates in one or more domains (Steiner and Carr in Educ Psychol Rev 15(3):215-246, 2003). These children potentially share a cognitive advantage enabling them to excel in language, but also in other domains. In the present study we explored whether gifted…

A data-driven, transdiagnostic approach was used to identify the cognitive dimensions linked with learning in a mixed group of 805 children aged 5 to 18 years recognized as having problems in attention, learning, and memory by a health or education practitioner. Assessments included phonological processing; information processing speed; short-term…

Sleep is considered to support the formation of skill memory. In juvenile but not adult song birds learning a tutor's song, a stronger initial deterioration of song performance over night-sleep predicts better song performance in the long run. This and similar observations have stimulated the view of sleep supporting skill formation during…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between sports experience (i.e., tennis experience) and executive function in children while controlling for physical activity and physical fitness. Sixty-eight participants (6-12 years old, 34 males and 34 females) were enrolled in regular tennis lessons (mean = 2.4 years,…

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and…

Previous research suggests that individuals with developmental dyslexia perform below typical readers on non-linguistic cognitive tasks involving the learning and encoding of statistical-sequential patterns. However, the neural mechanisms underlying such a deficit have not been well examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the…

Previous research has shown that children aged 4-5 years, but not 2-3 years, show adult-like interference from a partner when performing a joint task (Milward, Kita, & Apperly, 2014). This raises questions about the cognitive skills involved in the development of such "corepresentation (CR)" of a partner (Sebanz, Knoblich, &…

The present study examined development-related differences in saccade curvature during a goal-directed saccade task in the presence of distracting visual information. Participants were individuals who ranged in age from 6 to 30 years. Consistent with previous findings, all participants showed curvature toward the distractor stimulus at shorter…