Although small children have autobiographical memories, as they grow, they forget its specific details. Although this forgetting is common in early childhood, the presence of effective cues may help recall autobiographical memories. This study examines the effect of verbal and visual cues on the long-term maintenance of a school trip…

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…

This study examined the effects on attitudes and lifestyle behavior of "Jog your Mind," a multi-factorial community-based program promoting cognitive vitality among seniors with no known cognitive impairment. A quasi-experimental study was conducted. Twenty-three community organizations were assigned either to the experimental group…

Research has demonstrated a link between perspective taking and working memory. Here we used eye tracking to examine the time course with which working memory load (WML) influences perspective-taking ability in a referential communication task and how motivation to take another's perspective modulates these effects. In Experiment 1, where there…

Strategies based memory training programs are widely used to enhance the cognitive abilities of the elderly. Participants in these training programs are usually people whose mental abilities remain intact. Occasionally, people with cognitive impairment also participate. The aim of this study was to test if memory training designed specifically for…

Clinical evidence has shown that physical exercise during pregnancy may alter brain development and improve cognitive function of offspring. However, the mechanisms through which maternal exercise might promote such effects are not well understood. The present study examined levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and absolute cell…

Despite evidence supporting the presence of cognitive deficits in children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD), the nature of these deficits and their clinical and adaptive correlates remain unclear. Moreover, there are few cognitive studies of ASD siblings as a high risk population. We compared 50 children and…

The present study investigated the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and word reading in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2), with children's cognitive/linguistic skills considered as mediators and/or moderators. One hundred ninety-nine Chinese kindergarteners in Hong Kong with diverse SES backgrounds participated in this study. SES…

School psychologists should be aware of developmental risk factors for children who have been abused or neglected. The present study used the "Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition" to examine the cognitive abilities of 120 children in foster care subsequent to maltreatment. Results indicated that, compared to a…

Background: Despite doubts voiced on their efficacy, a series of studies has been carried out on the capacity of training programmes to improve academic and reasoning skills by focusing on underlying cognitive abilities and working memory in particular. No systematic efforts have been made, however, to test training programmes that involve both…

Adolescent cannabis use is associated with working memory impairment. The present randomized controlled trial assigned adolescents ages 14 to 21 enrolled in cannabis use treatment to receive either working memory training (experimental group) or a control training (control group) as an adjunctive treatment. Cognitive function, drug use, and other…

This study examined how well nonverbal IQ (or fluid intelligence), vocabulary, phonological awareness (PA), rapid autonomized naming (RAN), and phonological short-term memory (STM) predicted mathematics outcomes. The 208 participating kindergartners were administered tests of fluid intelligence, vocabulary, PA, RAN, STM, and numeracy in the fall…

There is accumulating evidence that training on working memory (WM) generalizes to other nontrained domains, and there are reports of transfer effects extending as far as to measures of fluid intelligence. Although there have been several demonstrations of such transfer effects in young adults and children, they have been difficult to demonstrate…

The placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment but rather to an individual's mindset (Benson & Friedman, 1996). This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In 2 studies examining whether…

The present study aimed to examine the nature of the working memory and general cognitive ability deficits experienced by university students with a specific reading comprehension deficit. A total of 32 university students with poor reading comprehension but average word-reading skills and 60 age-word-matched controls with no comprehension…