Research with anxious and depressed adults has suggested that anxiety is related to an increased anticipation of both negative memories and negative expectancies whereas depression is related to a reduction in positive memories and expectancies. The present study examined whether anxiety and depression in 123 school-aged adolescents would show the…

Theoretically, prospective memory retrieval can be accomplished either by controlled monitoring of the environment for a target event or by a more reflexive process that spontaneously responds to the presence of a target event. These views were evaluated in Experiments 1-4 by examining whether performing a prospective memory task produced costs on…

Proactive interference (PI) may influence the predictive utility of working memory span tasks. Participants in one experiment (N=70) completed Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) and multiple versions of operation span and probed recall, modified for the type of memoranda (digits or words). Changing memoranda within- or across-trials…

In list-method directed forgetting, participants are cued to intentionally forget a previously studied list while remembering a subsequently presented 2nd list. Results from prior research are inconclusive on whether older adults show deficits in this type of task. In 3 experiments, the authors reexamined the issue and compared younger and older…

Attention and working memory limitations set strict limits on visual representations, yet researchers have little appreciation of how these limits constrain the acquisition of information in ongoing visually guided behavior. Subjects performed a brick sorting task in a virtual environment. A change was made to 1 of the features of the brick being…

Relational complexity (RC) theory conceptualizes an individual's processing capacity and a task's complexity along a common ordinal metric. The authors describe the development of the Latin Square Task (LST) that assesses the influence of RC on reasoning. The LST minimizes the role of knowledge and storage capacity and thus refines the…

Measuring the changes in neurotransmitter extracellular levels in discrete brain areas is considered a tool for identifying the neuronal systems involved in specific behavioral responses or cognitive processes. Acetylcholine (ACh) is the first neurotransmitter whose diffusion from the central nervous system was investigated and whose extracellular…

Despite their purported neuroanatomic and functional isolation, empirical evidence suggests that sometimes conscious explicit processes can influence implicit motor skill learning. Our goal was to determine if the provision of explicit information affected implicit motor-sequence learning after damage to the basal ganglia. Individuals with stroke…

We examined implicit and explicit memory in adults with Williams syndrome. An age-related dissociation was found; repetition priming (reflecting implicit memory) did not show change with age, but free recall (reflecting explicit memory) was markedly reduced. We also compared the performance of adults with Williams syndrome to adults with Down…

Using two sequential key press sequences, we tested the extent to which subjects' performance on a digital piano keyboard changed between the end of training and retest on subsequent days. We found consistent, significant improvements attributable to sleep-based consolidation effects, indicating that learning continued after the cessation of…

The aim of the 2018 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive…

Objective: The effects of interference, competition, and distraction on cognitive processing are unclearly understood, particularly regarding type and intensity of auditory distraction across a variety of cognitive processing tasks. Method: The purpose of this investigation was to report two experiments that sought to explore the effects of types…

Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that…

Cognition-related brain responses to meaningful and meaningless figures were registered in 5-year-old kindergarten children who either had been subtyped as being at-risk of developing an L- or P-type dyslexia (LAL versus LAP) or who were not at-risk. While identifying, naming, or categorizing pictures, event-related potentials (ERP) were…

Pictures are often used by cognitive psychologists to investigate the development of cognitive functions. Different attributes of the picture, such as object or picture familiarity, word frequency, and age of acquisition, are known to correlate with naming latency and to affect memory, particularly retrieval processes. But without the use of…