Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose…

Aim: Although approximately 40% of children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) meet diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the impact of ADHD on the executive functioning of children with NF1 is not understood. We investigated whether spatial working memory and response inhibition are impaired in children with…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects that a self-monitoring strategy, plus a tactile prompting device, had upon the on-task and oral reading fluency behaviors of students with emotional and/or behavioral disabilities in the general education setting when used during whole group reading instruction. A multiple-baseline across pairs…

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of nonarbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children, whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism, suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese…

Intrinsic persistent spiking mechanisms in medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) neurons may play a role in active maintenance of working memory. However, electrophysiological studies of rat mEC units have primarily focused on spatial modulation. We sought evidence of differential spike rates in the mEC in rats trained on a T-maze, cued spatial delayed…

Many studies conducted in the United States (U.S.) have documented a positivity effect in aging--a tendency for older adults to remember more positive than negative information in comparison to young adults. Despite this cognitive emotional benefit, U.S. adults still hold a more negative view of aging compared to adults in Asia. We hypothesized…

Individuals who engage in problem behavior should be taught an appropriate behavior that meets the same function and replaces the problem behavior. Often, there are several appropriate replacement behaviors, and guidance is needed to choose among them. This study employs a hybrid single subject design with a baseline, alternating treatments, and…

Previous research has demonstrated a female advantage, albeit imperfectly, on tests of object location memory where object identity information is readily available. However, spatial and visual elements are often confounded in the experimental tasks used. Here spatial and visual memory performance was compared in 30 men and 30 women by presenting…

Brain imaging studies provide strong evidence for the involvement of the human mirror system during the observation of complex movements, depending on the individual's motor expertise. Here, we ask the question whether motor expertise not only affects perception while observing movements, but also benefits perception while solving mental rotation…

A fundamental question in human cognition is how people reason about space. We use a computational model to explore cross-cultural commonalities and differences in spatial cognition. Our model is based upon two hypotheses: (1) the structure-mapping model of analogy can explain the visual comparisons used in spatial reasoning; and (2) qualitative,…

The goal of the current study was to compare two forms of dynamic assessment and standard assessment of preschool children's phonological awareness. The first form of dynamic assessment was a form of scaffolding in which item formats were modified in response to an error so as to make the task easier or more explicit. The second form of dynamic…

Individual differences in working memory (WM) performance have rarely been related to individual differences in the functional responsivity of the WM brain network. By neglecting person-to-person variation, comparisons of network activity between younger and older adults using functional imaging techniques often confound differences in activity…

The present study investigated auditory temporal processing in developmental dyslexia by using a vowel length discrimination task. Both temporal and phonological processing were studied in a single experiment. Seven German vowel pairs differing in vowel height were used. The vowels of each pair differed only with respect to vowel length (e.g., /a/…

The standardization of loadings gives a metric to the corresponding latent variable and thus scales the variance of this latent variable. By assigning an appropriately estimated weight to all the loadings on the same latent variable it can be achieved that the average squared loading is 1 as the result of standardization. As a consequence, there…

The present study investigated interpretation bias and reduced evidence for danger (RED) bias in 49 children with social phobia and 49 nonsocially anxious children between the ages of 8 and 14 years, using an ambiguous stories task. A posttreatment and follow-up measure was included for 26 of the socially phobic children to examine whether there…