Two experiments examined whether 4-month-olds (n = 120) who were induced to assign two objects to different categories would then be able to take advantage of these contrastive categorical encodings to individuate and track the objects. In each experiment, infants first watched functional demonstrations of two tools, a masher and tongs (Experiment…

Introduction: Among its contemporaries, the updated Bloom's taxonomy is perhaps the most widely used cognitive process model. It is a categorization paradigm that emphasizes the cognitive levels beginning with remembering the information and progressing to more complicated levels such as producing the knowledge. Education psychologists want to…

Fluency is an important construct in clinical assessment and in cognitive taxonomies. In the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model, Fluency is represented by several narrow factors that form a subset of the long-term memory encoding and retrieval (Glr) broad factor. The CHC broad classification of Fluency was evaluated in five data sets, and the CHC…

Introduction: Studies of Dynamic Assessment of cognitive abilities reveal that young children profit from assistance while carrying out tasks that elicit cognitive effort. Dynamic assessment refers to a test format of a pretest-mediation-posttest in which the mediation phase includes scaffolding to assist the child to grasp the purpose of the…

An emphasis on higher-order thinking within the curriculum has been a subject of interest in the chemical and STEM literature due to its ability to promote meaningful, transferable learning in students. The systematic use of learning taxonomies could be a practical way to scaffold student learning in order to achieve this goal. This work proposes…

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities.…

The Vygotsky Blocks Test assesses problem-solving styles within a theoretical framework for the development of higher mental processes devised by Vygotsky. Because both the theory and the associated test situate cognitive development within the child's social and linguistic context, they address conceptual issues around the developmental relation…

Cognitive assessments are used for a variety of research and clinical purposes in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study establishes concurrent validity of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children-fourth edition (WISC-IV) and Differential Ability Scales-second edition (DAS-II) in a sample of children with ASD with a broad…

Two studies examined whether adults and children could learn to make context-dependent inferences about novel stimuli and the role of awareness of context cues in such learning. Participants were trained to match probes to targets on the basis of shape or color with the relevant dimension shifting according to item context. A selective induction…

The goal of the presented experiments was to investigate the dynamic interplay of task shielding and its relaxation during task switching. Task shielding refers to the finding that single task sets in terms of 2-choice categorization rules help shielding against distraction from irrelevant stimulus attributes. During task switching, this shielding…

Systems that can detect cognitive decline or harmful levels of stress could assist users in managing their stress and health. However, current assessments are often obtrusive or require specialized equipment, and not suited to continuous monitoring of cognitive status. This research leverages attributes of everyday keyboard interactions to…

Although functional cerebral asymmetries (FCAs) affect all cognitive domains, their modulation of the efficacy of specific executive functions is largely unexplored. In the present study, we used a lateralized version of the task switching paradigm to investigate the relevance of hemispheric asymmetries for cognitive control processes. Words were…

Faculty members in higher education are challenged to meet the needs of an increasingly learning-diverse student body. Neuroscience research indicates that individual variations in brain function affect each learner's ability to process and express information. Using this research as a foundation, the theory and principles of universal course…

The Woodcock-Johnson-Fourth edition (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) are two of the major tests of cognitive abilities used in school psychology. The complete WJ IV battery includes the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Schrank,…

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the various neurocognitive processes concomitant to reading by attempting to identify various subtypes of reading disorders in a referred sample. Participants were 216 elementary school students in grades two through five who were given select subtests of the Woodcock Johnson-III Tests of…