The aim of this study was to examine the effects of a BATAK Pro™ training program in combination with regular sport-specific training as compared with sport-specific training alone on motor performance among young athletes. Twenty-two athletes (aged 11-16 years) were recruited and randomly assigned to either an active control group or BATAK…

A number of researchers have found behavior-specific praise (BSP) to be an effective strategy for increasing student academic engagement. Performance feedback is often used to promote teacher BSP; however, variations in how performance feedback is provided have been proposed and it is unknown whether one strategy may be more effective than others.…

Working memory is critical for learning but has a limited capacity for processing new information in real time. Cognitive load theory is an evidence-based approach to education that seeks to minimize the extraneous (unnecessary) load on working memory to avoid overloading it. The "seductive details effect" postulates that extraneous load…

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by a complex maturation process of various cognitive abilities. Cognitive control, which includes response inhibition and working memory, is one of them. A typical study on response inhibition to visual stimuli presents distractors and targets on the same display (e.g., the computer screen).…

This research developed a multimodal picture-word task for assessing the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by 100 children between 4 and 14 years of age. We assessed how manipulation of seemingly to-be-ignored auditory (A) and audiovisual (AV) phonological distractors affected picture naming without participants consciously…

The study assessed task performance of 25 hyperactive and 22 normal children (six to ten years old) with and without within-task color, holding task complexity constant. (Author)

A review of the literature on the spatial functioning of the blind, the results of a questionnaire of 75 sighted college students and their parents, and results of a study of 87 blind and seeing adults' performance on three spatial tasks are presented. The review suggested that adventitiously blind individuals perform better than congenitally…

Compares comprehension monitoring skills of younger (five- to six-year-old) and older (eight- to nine-year-old) children. Subjects examined ambiguous and incomplete pictorial instructions for making two models and were asked whether they needed additional information to make the models. (RH)

Three experiments explored effects of stimulus and task factors on tendency to categorize according to taxonomic relations when those relations conflict with appearances. When provided with information that constrained categorization, preschoolers and adults reliably based their decisions on taxonomic relations between physically dissimilar items.…

Investigated the role of an external clock in two temporal conditioning situations involving three-year olds. One situation required the spacing of responses to visual stimuli; the other, producing a response for a set duration. Found that the presence of the clock increased the efficiency of performance. (SW)

Compared the performance of children with and without autism in object-based positive and negative priming tasks within a visual search procedure. Found object-based positive and negative priming effects in both groups, with no group differences in the magnitude of the effects. Compared to typically developing children, children with autism were…

To determine whether preschool children's memory for unfamiliar faces could be facilitated by giving them orienting information about faces, 4- and 5-year-old subjects were told that they were going to play a guessing game in which they would be looking at faces and guessing which ones they had seen before. In study 1, 6 boys and 6 girls within…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

This study examined the use of visual feedback (VF) by typists at various skill levels. Subjects performed typing trials under four conditions: unrestricted VF, VF for response confirmation, VF for response guidance, and restricted VF. Results suggest similar use of visual feedback by typists of different skill levels. (Author/SJL)