Visual comparison is a key process in everyday learning and reasoning. Recent research has discovered the spatial alignment principle, based on the broader framework of structure-mapping theory in comparison. According to the spatial alignment principle, visual comparison is more efficient when the figures being compared are arranged in…

Purpose: Previous studies show that there is increased brain activity after exercise, leading to improved word recall in adults. The aim of this study was to examine whether different types of exercise (i.e., aerobic vs. anaerobic) may also lead to improved performance during vocabulary learning in children. Method: A total of 48 participants (24…

Evidence regarding the benefits of an instructor's deictic gestures in video lectures on adults' learning may not necessarily be reflective of their effect on children's learning. Furthermore, there is a lack evidence regarding how deictic gestures specifically affect learners' learning process. Based in cognitive load theory, with consideration…

Response inhibition is crucial for mental and physical health but studies assessing the trainability of this type of inhibition are rare. Thirty-nine children aged 10-12 years and 46 adults aged 18-24 years were assigned to an adaptive go/no-go inhibition training condition or an active control condition. Transfer of training effects to…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explore, analyse and summarise the potential tangible user interface (TUI) design features for dyslexics learning to read and spell. Design/methodology/approach: This study adopts a systematic literature review method through a manual search of published papers from 2011. This systematic literature review…

Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience--physically rotating objects--or gesture experience--showing how objects could rotate (e.g., Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Levine, Goldin-Meadow, Carlson, & Hemani-Lopez, 2018). These…

An improvement in cognitive performance through brain games play is implicit yet progressive. It is necessary to explore factors that potentially accelerate this improvement process. Like various other significant yet unexplored aspects, it is equally essential to establish a performative (fusion of accuracy and efficiency) insight about players'…

Self-derivation of new factual knowledge through integration of separate episodes of learning is one means by which children build knowledge. Content generated in this manner becomes incorporated into the knowledge base and is retained over time; successful self-derivation predicts academic achievement. Yet the component processes on which…

The current experiment investigated the extent to which three variables (autism severity, nonverbal intellectual functioning, and verbal intellectual functioning) are associated with over-selective responding in a group of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This paper also analyzed the association of these three variables with the recovery of…

Some research on literacy acquisition suggests that implicit learning processes may be related to reading and writing proficiency in English, which is a deep orthography. However, little research has been done to determine if the same is true in shallow orthographies. Here, we investigated whether the implicit learning ability of third grade…

We tested whether analogical training could help children learn a key principle of elementary engineering--namely, the use of a diagonal brace to stabilize a structure. The context for this learning was a construction activity at the Chicago Children's Museum, in which children and their families build a model skyscraper together. The results…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Background: Outcomes of static tests provide an indication of what children have learned in the past, up to the moment of testing, and can therefore underestimate the cognitive abilities of atypically developing children, such as children with language difficulties. In contrast, dynamic tests aim to examine children's potential for learning. The…

Background: There is an increased focus on randomized trials for proximal behavioral outcomes in early childhood research. However, planning sample sizes for such designs requires extant information on the size of effect, variance decomposition, and effectiveness of covariates. Objectives: The purpose of this article is to employ a recent large…

Past studies have suggested that study time allocation partially mediates age relations on memory performance in a verbal task. To identify whether this applied to a different material modality, participants ages 20-87 completed a spatial task in addition to a traditional verbal task. In both the verbal and the spatial task, increased age was…