Cognitive abilities are essential to children's overall growth; thus, the implementation of early and effective training interventions is a major challenge for developmental psychologists and teachers. This study explores whether an intervention simultaneously operating on fluid reasoning (FR), visuospatial, narrative, and motor abilities could…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

Working memory (WM) measures are routinely integrated into comprehensive diagnostic evaluations. However, there is little research regarding the underlying components of WM and their developmental trajectories. The current study examined the developmental trajectories of distinct WM components in a sample of 303 individuals ages 6 through…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Because math knowledge begins to develop at a young age to varying degrees, it is important to identify foundational cognitive and academic skills that might contribute to its development. The current study focused on two important, but often overlooked skills that recent evidence suggests are important contributors to early math development:…

Children experience good and bad days in their performance. Although this phenomenon is well-known to teachers, parents, and students it has not been investigated empirically. We examined whether children's working memory performance varies systematically from day to day and to which extent fluctuations at faster timescales (i.e., occasions,…

What cognitive processes influence how well we maintain information in visual short-term memory (VSTM)? We used a developmentally informed design to delve into the interplay of top-down spatial biases with the nature of the internal memory codes, motivated by documented changes for both factors over childhood. Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and…

Two studies are reported comparing the performance of monolingual and bilingual children on tasks requiring different levels of working memory. In the first study, 56 5-year-olds performed a Simon-type task that manipulated working memory demands by comparing conditions based on two rules and four rules and manipulated conflict resolution demands…

Weaknesses in early number skills have been found to be a risk factor for later difficulties in mathematical performance. Nevertheless, only a few intervention studies with young children have been published. In this study, the responsiveness to early support in kindergarteners with most severe difficulties was examined with two different computer…

Neurocognitive processes such as executive functioning (EF) may influence the development of speech-language skills in deaf children after cochlear implantation in ways that differ from normal-hearing, typically developing children. Conversely, spoken language abilities and experiences may also exert reciprocal effects on the development of EF.…

Decades of research have demonstrated that deaf children generally lag behind hearing peers in terms of academic achievement, and that lags in some areas may never be overcome fully. Hundreds of research and intervention studies have been aimed at improving the situation, but they have resulted in only limited progress. This paper examines…

Attention and working memory are fundamental for selecting and maintaining behaviorally relevant information. Not only do both processes closely intertwine at the cognitive level, but they implicate similar functional brain circuitries, namely the frontoparietal and the frontostriatal networks, which are innervated by cholinergic and dopaminergic…

Aim: Although approximately 40% of children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) meet diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the impact of ADHD on the executive functioning of children with NF1 is not understood. We investigated whether spatial working memory and response inhibition are impaired in children with…

This study tested a dynamic field theory (DFT) of spatial working memory and an associated spatial precision hypothesis (SPH). Between 3 and 6 years of age, there is a qualitative shift in how children use reference axes to remember locations: 3-year-olds' spatial recall responses are biased toward reference axes after short memory delays, whereas…

Like adults, infants use working memory to represent occluded objects and can update these memory representations to reflect changes to a scene that unfold over time. Here we tested the limits of infants' ability to update object representations in working memory. Eleven-month-old infants participated in a modified foraging task in which they saw…