Ancient as well as modern writers have promoted the idea that bizarre images enhance memory. Research has documented bizarreness effects, with one standard technique finding that sentences describing unusual, implausible, or bizarre scenarios are better remembered than sentences describing plausible, every day, or common scenarios. Not…

This study aimed to compare cognitive and memory abilities between older adults with and without autism over the age of 50. Twenty-eight individuals with autism and 29 typically developing (TD) older adults took part in the current study. Participants' cognitive and memory abilities were assessed by WAIS-IV and WMS-IV. Older autistic adults were…

Attribute amnesia (Chen & Wyble, 2015, 2016) demonstrates that we may not always be able to spontaneously retrieve a simple attribute of a visual object (e.g., its color) for conscious report, even though the object had just been the target in a visual task. Attribute amnesia has been suggested to reflect a lack of consolidation of the…

Working memory is now established as a fundamental cognitive process across a range of species. Loss of information held in working memory has the potential to disrupt many aspects of cognitive function. However, despite its significance, the mechanisms underlying rapid forgetting remain unclear, with intense recent debate as to whether it is…

Older adults often face decline in cognitive resources. How does this impact their decision making--especially under high cognitive demands from concurrent activities? Do older adults' decision processes uniformly decline with increasing mental strain relative to younger adults, or do they compensate for decline by strategically reallocating…

Purpose: The purpose of this preliminary study was to explore the associations among hearing loss, physical health, and visual memory in adults living in rural areas, urban clusters, and an urban city in west Central Alabama. Method: Two hundred ninety-seven adults (182 women, 115 men) from rural areas, urban clusters, and an urban city of west…

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders, and daily transient feelings of anxiety (or "stress") are ubiquitous. However, the precise impact of both transient and pathological anxiety on higher-order cognitive functions, including short- and long-term memory, is poorly understood. A clearer understanding of the…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have deficits in working memory, but little is known about the everyday memory of these children in real-life situations. We investigated the everyday memory function in children with DCD, and explored the specific profile of everyday memory across different domains. Nineteen children with…

The present study investigated cognitive abilities in children with difficulties in mathematics only (n = 48, M = 8 years and 5 months), combined mathematical and language difficulty (n = 27, M = 8 years and 1 month) and controls (n = 783, M = 7 years and 11 months). Cognitive abilities were measured with seven subtests, tapping visual perception,…

Working memory is typically defined as a system devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and processing of information. However, the interplay between these 2 functions is still a matter of debate in the literature, with views ranging from complete independence to complete dependence. The time-based resource-sharing model assumes that a central…

This study examined supraspan free recall in children with and without spelling impairment. A repeated free recall task involving overt rehearsal and three computer-based adaptive working memory tasks were administered to 54 eight-year-old children. Children without spelling impairments tended to recall more items than did those children with…

Decades of research have demonstrated that deaf children generally lag behind hearing peers in terms of academic achievement, and that lags in some areas may never be overcome fully. Hundreds of research and intervention studies have been aimed at improving the situation, but they have resulted in only limited progress. This paper examines…

The Woodcock-Johnson-Fourth edition (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) are two of the major tests of cognitive abilities used in school psychology. The complete WJ IV battery includes the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Schrank,…

This study investigated the differential contribution of auditory-verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) on decoding skills in second- and fifth-grade children identified with poor decoding. Thirty-two second-grade students and 22 fifth-grade students completed measures that assessed simple and complex auditory-verbal and visuospatial memory,…