Objective: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Freedom-from-Distractibility/Working Memory Index (FDI/WMI), Processing Speed Index (PSI), and Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS) scores in ADHD children were examined as a function of subtype and coexisting anxiety, depression, and oppositional-defiant disorder. Method: Participants were 587…

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). "Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996)." "Psychological…

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…

Obtained self-reports of memory abilities and skills from 50 younger and 50 older adults. General rating questions and specific questions about memory for certain types of content were included. Consistent age-related decrements were found only for general questions, especially those assessing perceived changes over time. Less consistent…

Discusses laws and general characteristics of normal memory, specifying how exceptional memory feats deviate from and contradict them. Also discusses research in support of the assertion that normal memory structure is sufficient to explain exceptional memory feats, if differences in practice and prior experiences are taken into account.…

Three experiments demonstrated that increasing the length of a mobile serial list impaired 6-month olds' memory for serial order. Findings indicated that the primacy effect was absent on a 24-hour delayed recognition test and was exhibited on a reactivation test, adding to growing evidence that young infants possess two functionally distinct…

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…

What are the consequences of calling things by their names? Six experiments investigated how classifying familiar objects with basic-level names (chairs, tables, and lamps) affected recognition memory. Memory was found to be worse for items that were overtly classified with the category name--as reflected by lower hit rates--compared with items…

Surgical disconnection of the frontal cortex and inferotemporal cortex severely impairs many aspects of visual learning and memory, including learning of new object-in-place scene memory problems, a monkey model of episodic memory. As part of a study of specialization within prefrontal cortex in visual learning and memory, we tested monkeys with…

Languages differ in how they encode motion. When describing bounded motion, English speakers typically use verbs that convey information about manner (e.g., "slide", "skip", "walk") rather than path (e.g., "approach", "ascend"), whereas Greek speakers do the opposite. We investigated whether this strong cross-language difference influences how…

The grouping of list items is known to improve serial memory accuracy and constrain the nature of temporal errors. A recent study (M. T. Maybery, F. B. R. Parmentier, & D. M. Jones, 2002) showed that grouping results in a temporal organization of the participants' responses that mimics the list structure but not the timing of its presentation.…

This article analyzes the effortful control of automatic processing related to social and emotional behavior, including control over evolved modules designed to solve problems of survival and reproduction that were recurrent over evolutionary time. The inputs to effortful control mechanisms include a wide range of nonrecurrent…

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content,…

In this paper it is proposed that the prefrontal lobe participates in two closely related but different executive function abilities: (1) "metacognitive executive functions": problem solving, planning, concept formation, strategy development and implementation, controlling attention, working memory, and the like; that is, executive functions as…

Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good…