The purpose of this study was to analyze participants' levels of hemoglobin as they performed arithmetic mental calculations using Optical Topography (OT, helmet type brain-scanning system, also known as Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy or fNIRS). A central issue in cognitive neuroscience involves the study of how the human brain encodes and…

Two studies are reported that explore the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Following previous reports of a bilingual advantage in executive control that sometimes shows a greater advantage in older adults, we compared younger and older monolinguals and bilinguals on a memory paradigm that yielded separate measures of familiarity and…

We aimed to clarify the importance of early visual processing deficits for the formation of cognitive deficits in the schizophrenia spectrum. We carried out an event-related potential (ERP) study using a computerised delayed matching to sample working memory (WM) task on a sample of volunteers with high and low scores on the Schizotypal…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to monitor infant brain activity during the initial encoding of a previously novel visual stimulus, and examined whether ERP measures of encoding predicted infants' subsequent performance on a visual memory task (i.e., the paired-comparison task). A late slow wave component of the ERP measured…

Eye-movement control during scene viewing can be represented as a series of individual decisions about where and when to move the eyes. While substantial behavioral and computational research has been devoted to investigating the placement of fixations in scenes, relatively little is known about the mechanisms that control fixation durations.…

Congenital amusia refers to a lifelong disorder of music processing and is linked to pitch-processing deficits. The present study investigated congenital amusics' short-term memory for tones, musical timbres and words. Sequences of five events (tones, timbres or words) were presented in pairs and participants had to indicate whether the sequences…

Introductory biology courses are widely criticized for overemphasizing details and rote memorization of facts. Data to support such claims, however, are surprisingly scarce. We sought to determine whether this claim was evidence-based. To do so we quantified the cognitive level of learning targeted by faculty in introductory-level biology courses.…

Over the last century many individuals with exceptional memory have been studied and tested in the laboratory. This article studies Chao Lu, who set a Guinness World Record by memorizing 67,890 decimals of pi. Chao Lu's superior self-paced memorization of digits is shown through analyses of study times and verbal reports to be mediated by mnemonic…

As a group, participants with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are impaired in academic performance and learning. This may be due to a mild intellectual impairment, impaired attention, or inability to allocate sufficient effort. If the latter is the case, this should be evident in the learning strategies applied. Four indices of…

This research investigated the cognitive processes underlying remember-know judgments in terms of contextual binding in multidimensional source memory. Stochastic dependence between the retrieval of different context attributes, which formed the empirical criterion of binding, was observed for remembered items but not for known items. Experiment 1…

The information that individuals can hold in working memory is quite limited, but researchers have typically studied this capacity using simple objects or letter strings with no associations between them. However, in the real world there are strong associations and regularities in the input. In an information theoretic sense, regularities…

The authors investigated the strategic component (i.e., elaboration and organization of episodic features) and the associative component (i.e., binding processes) of episodic memory and their interactions in 4 age groups (10-12, 13-15, 20-25, and 70-75 years of age). On the basis of behavioral and neural evidence, the authors hypothesized that the…

Every few years in the United States, history teachers go through what some believe is an embarrassing national ritual. A representative group of students sit down to take a standardized U.S. history test, and the results show varied success. Sizable percentages of students score at or below a "basic" understanding of the country's history.…

Introduction: The cognitive processes that underpin successful mathematical processing in children have been well researched by experimental psychologists, but are not widely understood among teachers of primary mathematics. This is a shame, as an understanding of these cognitive processes could be highly useful to practitioners. This paper…

Long-term memory (LTM) is enhanced for emotional information, but the influence of stimulus emotionality on short-term memory (STM) is less clear. We examined the electrophysiological correlates of improved visual STM for emotional face identity, focusing on the P1, N170, P3b and N250r event-related potential (ERP) components. These correlates are…