This study demonstrated effects of age, education, and sex on complex reaction time in a large national sample (N = 3,616) with a wide range in age (32-85) and education. Participants completed speeded auditory tasks (from the MIDUS [Midlife in the U.S.] Stop and Go Switch Task) by telephone. Complexity ranged from a simple repeated task to an…

One hypothesized reason for the lower rates of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) response among older as compared to younger anxiety patients is that they are more likely to show age-related deficits in executive skills, which are complex cognitive skills involved in the regulation of negative affect. Following an 8-week baseline period, this pilot…

Despite many disagreements on the utility of neuropsychological applications in schools, executive function measures have been found to be useful across a variety of areas and ages. In addition, many disagreements are extant in discussions of the maturational course of the development of executive functioning abilities that are dependent on…

This study investigated children's, adolescents', and young adults' judgments and reasoning about teaching two values (racial equality and patriotism) using methods that varied in provision for children's rational autonomy, active involvement, and choice. Ninety-six participants (7-8-, 10-11-, and 13-14-year-olds, and college students) evaluated…

The aim of this research was to explore Australian high-school students' argumentation and informal reasoning about biotechnology. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 10 Year-8 students (12-13 years old), 14 Year-10 students (14-15 years old) and 6 Year-12 students (16-17 years old) from six metropolitan high schools in Perth,…

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad…

In this study we examined the development of three action monitoring event-related potentials (ERPs)--the error-related negativity (ERN/Ne), error positivity (P[subscript E]) and the N2--and estimated their neural sources. These ERPs were recorded during a flanker task in the following groups: early adolescents (mean age = 12 years), late…

Although it is generally accepted that labels facilitate categorization in infancy, recent evidence suggests that infants and young children are more likely to process visual input when presented in isolation than when paired with nonlinguistic sounds or linguistic labels. These findings suggest that auditory input (when compared to a no-auditory…

In two studies of knowledge about the properties and processes of memory for the times of past events, 178 children from 5 through 13 years of age and 40 adults answered questions about how they would remember times on different scales, how temporal memory is affected by retention interval, and the usefulness of different methods. The adults…

The development of language indicating the emergence of thinking about the thoughts of self and others has been scarcely studied in Spanish-speaking children. For this reason, we studied the development of mental state language and various indicators of language development in 25 Spanish-speaking children assessed at 3, 3 1/2, 4, 4 1/2, and 5…

Research on children's knowledge of illnesses has largely concentrated on studying how children reason about common innocuous diseases. It is also important to uncover how children reason about more severe diseases, such as cancer, to be able to treat and communicate with children diagnosed with this disease. Several aspects of prevalent childhood…

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian-English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which…

We examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and heuristic responding on four types of reasoning and decision-making tasks. A total of 84 children, between 5 years 2 months and 11 years 7 months of age, participated in the study. There was a marked increase in heuristic responding with age that was related to increases in cognitive…

Groups of mathematically strong and weak second-, fourth- and sixth-graders were individually confronted with numerosities smaller and larger than 100 embedded in one-, two- or three-dimensional realistic contexts. While one third of these contexts were totally unstructured (e.g., an irregular piece of land jumbled up with 72 cars), another third…

This study examined the ability of young children to correct comprehension errors, considered to be an aspect of comprehension monitoring. Kindergartners and second graders (N=32) heard a story about an unfamiliar situation, then answered questions which either assessed information contained within a single sentence, required the correct…