The ability to reason and problem-solve in novel situations, as measured by the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), is highly predictive of both cognitive task performance and real-world outcomes. Here we provide evidence that RAPM performance depends on the ability to reallocate attention in response to self-generated feedback about…

Several studies have demonstrated that individual differences in processing speed fully mediate the association between age and intelligence, whereas the association between processing speed and intelligence cannot be explained by age differences. Because measures of processing speed reflect a plethora of cognitive and motivational processes, it…

Listening to speech in a noisy background is difficult for everyone. While such listening has historically been considered mainly in the context of auditory processing, the role of cognition has attracted considerable interest in recent years. This has been particularly true in the context of life-span research and the comparison of younger and…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 2002 for work on judgment and decision-making tasks that are the operational measures of rational thought in cognitive science. Because assessments of intelligence (and similar tests of cognitive ability) are taken to be the quintessence of good thinking, it might be thought that such measures would…

Background: The goal of this study was to examine the relationship between drinking motives and interpretation bias (interpreting ambiguous stimuli in an alcohol-related way) in problematic drinkers with and without mild to borderline intellectual disability (MBID). Method: Participants (N = 178) were divided into 4 groups based on severity of…

The ability to recognize temporal patterns and position events in time emerges during the preschool years and is refined in middle childhood. This study explored individual differences in temporal cognition in relation to verbal and nonverbal abilities. Children (30 boys, 32 girls; M[subscript age] = 8;2, age range = 6;0-10;8) completed 3…

Many people have serious difficulties in understanding rational numbers, limiting their ability to interpret and make use of them in modern daily life. This also leads to later difficulties in learning more advanced mathematical content. In this study, novel tasks are used to measure 263 late primary school students' spontaneous focusing on…

Being able to manage reputation is an important social skill, but it is unclear whether autistic children can manage reputation. This study investigated whether 33 autistic children matched to 33 typical children could implicitly or explicitly manage reputation. Further, we examined whether cognitive processes--theory of mind, social motivation,…

Purpose: Continuous performance tasks (CPTs) are used to measure individual differences in sustained attention. Many different stimuli have been used as response targets without consideration of their impact on task performance. Here, we compared CPT performance in typically developing adults and children to assess the role of stimulus processing…

Musically trained and untrained participants were administered tests of pitch processing and general intelligence ("g"). Trained participants exhibited superior performance on tests of pitch-processing speed and relative pitch. They were also better at frequency discrimination with tones at 400 Hz but not with very high tones (4000 Hz). The two…

To explore the possible neural foundations of individual differences in intelligence test scores, we examined the associations between Raven's Matrices scores and two tasks that were administered in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) setting. The two tasks were an n-back working memory (N = 37) task and inspection time (N = 47). The…