This study analyses the longitudinal relationship between early inhibitory control skills and subsequent emergent literacy. At Time 1, a sample of 50 typically monolingual Italian toddlers aged 28 to 36 months in their last year of day-care was assessed on expressive vocabulary and two inhibitory control measures, tapping specifically response…

Whereas some evidence exists that math anxiety may interfere with math performance from the very beginning of primary school, no study to date has attempted to investigate whether math anxiety may also interfere with early math learning (i.e., the encoding of new math knowledge) and not only with recalling already mastered contents in test…

Inhibition is thought to help suppress interference from misconceptions in science learning. Using a pre-, post-, and delayed posttest design, we examined the influence on learning from science texts of three inhibitory-related functions--prepotent response inhibition, resistance to distractor interference, and resistance to proactive…

When speakers name multiple semantically related items, opposing effects can be found. Semantic facilitation is found when naming 2 semantically related items in a row. In contrast, semantic interference is found when speakers name semantically related items separated by 1 or more intervening unrelated items. This latter form of interference is…

Movements with both hands are essential to our everyday life, and it has been shown that performing asymmetric bimanual movements produces an interference effect between hands. There have been many studies--using varying methods--investigating the development of bimanual movements that show that this skill continues to evolve during childhood and…

Verbal overshadowing reflects the impairment in memory performance following verbalization of nonverbal stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the same mechanisms are responsible for verbal overshadowing effects observed with different stimuli and task demands. In the present article, we propose a multiprocess view that reconciles the main…

Distraction during encoding has long been known to disrupt later memory performance. Contrary to this long-standing result, we show that detecting an infrequent target in a dual-task paradigm actually improves memory encoding for a concurrently presented word, above and beyond the performance reached in the full-attention condition. This absolute…