Neuroplasticity, defined as the brain's "potential" to change in response to its environment, has been extensively studied at the cellular and molecular levels. Work in animal models suggests that stimulation to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) enhances plasticity, and that myelination constrains plasticity. Little is known, however,…

Individual differences in cognitive performance depend on age, skill, and type of task. Nonetheless, whether performance is measured with accuracy (ACC) or with the trade-off between responding speed and accuracy (SAT) could render subtle different relationships. Age and skill might associate more strongly with SAT performance in reasoning tasks,…

Previous research has investigated the Spatial Numerical Associations of Response Codes (SNARC) effect as a measure of spatial number coding in relation to mathematics (Cipora et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14355). An issue that arises if one wants to correlate mathematical performance with the SNARC effect, is how individual…

Intra-individual response time variability (IIRTV) during cognitive performance is increasingly recognized as an important indicator of attentional control (AC) and related brain region function. However, what determinants contribute to preschoolers' IIRTV received little attention. The present study explored the interaction of dopaminergic…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

We used a technique known as reach tracking to investigate how individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) relate to the functioning of two processes proposed to underlie cognitive control: a threshold adjustment process that temporarily inhibits motor output in response to signals of conflict and a controlled selection process that…

Reading development involves several changes in orthographic processing. A key question is, "how does the coding of letters develops in children learning to read?" Masked priming effects of transposition and substitution primes have been taken to index the importance of letter position and identity coding. Somewhat contradicting results…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Algebraic thinking and strategy flexibility are essential to advanced mathematical thinking. Early algebra instruction uses 'missing-operand' problems (e.g., x - 7 = 2) solvable via two typical strategies: (1) direct retrieval of arithmetic facts (e.g., 9 - 7 = 2) and (2) performance of the inverse operation (e.g., 2 + 7 = 9). The current study…

The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

Performance in elementary cognitive tasks is moderately correlated with fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. These correlations are higher for more complex tasks, presumably due to increased demands on working memory capacity. In accordance with the binding hypothesis, which states that working memory capacity reflects the limit of a…

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The…

Individuals with greater cognitive abilities generally show reduced rates of mind-wandering when completing relatively demanding tasks (Randall, Oswald, & Beier, 2014). However, it is yet unclear whether elevated rates of mind-wandering among low-ability individuals are manifestations of deliberate, intentional episodes of mind-wandering…

Attention may be distracted from its intended focus both by stimuli in the external environment and by internally generated task-unrelated thoughts during mind wandering. However, previous attention research has focused almost exclusively on distraction by external stimuli, and the extent to which mind wandering relates to external distraction is…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…