Enhancing executive function in children and adolescents can have significant positive impact on their current and future daily lives. Upregulation of executive function associated with motor skill acquisition suggests that motor learning scenarios provide valuable developmental opportunities to optimize executive function. The present systematic…

Eyeblink conditioning is used in many species to study motor learning and make inferences about cerebellar function. However, the discrepancies in performance between humans and other species combined with evidence that volition and awareness can modulate learning suggest that eyeblink conditioning is not merely a passive form of learning that…

When learning to write Chinese characters, it is essential for students to learn and maintain the correct order of the strokes. Chinese teachers often use computer-supported drill and practice to develop students' ability to write in the correct order, but such devices are rarely designed to stimulate learners' memory-manipulation in cognitive…

Cognitive load theory seeks to generate novel instructional designs through a focus on human cognitive architecture including a limited working memory; however, the potential for enhancing learning through non-visual or non-auditory working memory channels is yet to be evaluated. This exploratory experiment tested whether explicit instructions to…

Although phonological representations have been a primary focus of verbal working memory research, lexical-semantic manipulations also influence performance. In the present study, the authors investigated whether a classic phenomenon in verbal working memory, the phonological similarity effect (PSE), is modulated by a lexical-semantic variable,…

Motor skill learning is a dynamic process that continues covertly after training has ended and eventually leads to delayed increments in performance. Current theories suggest that this off-line improvement takes time and appears only after several hours. Here we show an early transient and short-lived boost in performance, emerging as early as…

Sixteen school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 16 age-matched controls were tested for immediate recall of digits presented visually, auditorily, or audiovisually. Recall tasks compared speaking and pointing response modalities. SLI children showed small recency effects as well as an unusually poor recall when visually…