Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

There is general consensus that the representation of the human face becomes functionally specialized within the first few months of an infant's life. The literature is divided, however, on the question whether the specialized representation of the remainder of the human body form follows a similarly rapid trajectory or emerges more slowly and in…

Summary The goal of the present study was to examine the effects of playing an immersive virtual reality game that included a collection of gamified cognitive tasks, "Cerevrum," on specific components of cognition, including perceptual attention, mental rotation, working memory, visualization, visual field of view, and visual processing…

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language…

Worry is a common phenomenon in children and adolescents, with some experiencing excessive worries that cause significant distress and interference. The metacognitive model of generalized anxiety disorder (Wells 1995, 2009) was developed to explain cognitive processes associated with pathological worry in adults, particularly the role of positive…

The purpose of this study was to describe the cognitive level of professor discourse and student cognition during selected college of agriculture class sessions. Twenty-one undergraduate class sessions were videotaped in 12 professors' courses. Results were interpreted to show that professors' discourse was mostly (62%) at the knowledge and…

Sex differences in the latent general and broad cognitive abilities underlying the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities were investigated for children, youth, and adults ages 6 through 59. A developmental, multiple indicator-multiple cause, structural equation model was used to investigate sex differences in latent cognitive abilities as…

Executive functions (EF) are a group of interrelated complex mental abilities that are involved in planning and initiating goals and carrying them through despite interruptions. As these functions are typically higher-order and involved in integrating other, more basic, lower-order functions, they are difficult to assess directly, and executive…

Electrophysiology is a timely and important tool in the study of early cognitive development. This commentary polishes the definition of event-related potential (ERP) components; often interpreted as expressions of mental processes. Further, attention is drawn to time-frequency analysis of the electroencephalogram (EEG) which conveys much more…

Employed a modified dual task approach with 7- to 9-year olds to determine whether one of the classic M-power measures, the digit placement task, is indeed capacity-limited. Found that several critical assumptions concerning the use of the dual-task procedure were met; further testing revealed that the digit placement task is indeed…

Reviews Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test (KAIT), a new assessment of cognitive function for technical qualities such as reliability, validity, and standardization characters. Concludes that KAIT represents advancements in cognitive assessment but cannot be regarded as superior to existing intelligence measures until data is available…

Examined 1,100 boys and 1,100 girls who matched the U.S. population using the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) cognitive-processing theory, built on the neuropsychological work of A.R. Luria (1973). Results illustrate that the PASS theory offers a useful way to examine gender differences in cognitive performance. (BF)

A promising line of inquiry concerning the development and use of formal operations strategies is presented and a number of conceptual and empirical questions are raised. (Author/PN)

A presentation of arguments demonstrating piaget's sensorimotor stages in Hebb's terms, and the suggestion for performing a computer test. This paper is an early progress report of an attempt to translate some plausible arguments into a rigorous demonstration. (Author)

This study is aimed at trying to discover the isolable characteristics of intelligence, of the kind of mental processes which result from it, and of the relationship between intelligence and the formation of concepts. (Author)