This study explored the impact of oxidation-reduction reaction problem difficulty on university students' cognitive load using event-related potentials (ERPs). Forty-eight balanced low and high difficulty problems were designed. Fifteen undergraduate students majoring in chemistry (8 females and 7 males) participated in the study. Results…

Virtual reality (VR) is the computer simulation of a three-dimensional environment that a person can interact with using special electronic equipment, such as a headset with an integrated display. Often coupled with VR, exergames are video games that involve physical exercise. Little is known regarding the chronic effects of exergaming through VR…

The Hearts and Flowers (H&F) task is a computerized executive functioning (EF) assessment that has been used to measure EF from early childhood to adulthood. It provides data on accuracy and reaction time (RT) across three different task blocks (hearts, flowers, and mixed). However, there is a lack of consensus in the field on how to score the…

Children with ADHD show deficits in executive functioning, especially the ability to inhibit inadequate responses, and deficits in motivational processes due to dopaminergic dysfunctions. There is evidence that rewards can foster inhibition in children with ADHD. However, most studies examined a wide age range of children above 7 years of age, so…

Misconceptions coexisting with scientific understanding pose significant challenges in physics education. Inhibitory control may enable individuals to overcome interference from misconceptions. However, discerning the role of inhibitory control becomes intricate when the saliency of scientific- and misconception-related features varies in a…

Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical…

The effects of rewards on executive function (EF) reflect bidirectional interactions among motivational and executive systems that vary with age and temperament. However, methodological limitations hinder understanding of the precise influences of incentives on early EF, including the role of reward sensitivity. In this within-subjects study,…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Individual differences in reading performance between children appear from the onset of literacy acquisition. One possible explanation for this variability is the influence of inhibition in reading ability, a topic that has received very little research attention. Nevertheless, children often make guessing errors characterized by replacing a word…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate executive control in adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS) via a nonspeech paradigm, wherein eye movements were monitored (i.e., antisaccade task). Processes involved in an antisaccade task include working memory, attention, and voluntary motor control, but the task…

The present study investigated the role of executive functions in the development of two aspects of timing: temporal reproduction and comparison. Children aged 7 and 10 years and young adults were asked to either reproduce target durations (i.e., reproduction task) or judge the similarity of two target durations (i.e., comparison task). These…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

This study tested whether the bivariate association between simple reaction time (SRT) and executive function (EF) performance that has been observed in early childhood represented a between- and/or within-person association. Up to three repeated assessments (i.e., fall, winter, and spring assessments from September to May) were available for 282…

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…

Bimodal bilingualism involves the use of a sign language and a spoken language, and offers a unique opportunity to explore the cognitive effects of growing up bilingual. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between bimodal bilingualism and executive function (EF) in hearing children who are native users of a sign language. We…