Learning requires applying limited working memory and attentional resources to intrinsic, germane, and extraneous aspects of the learning task. To reduce the especially undesirable extraneous load aspects of learning environments, cognitive load theorists suggest that spatially integrated learning materials should be used instead of spatially…

We here report two studies exploring associations between inhibitory control (measured with the Sustained Attention to Response Task, SART) on the one hand, and self-reports of trait cooperativeness and empathy on the other. A coherent picture was obtained in women whose inhibitory control proficiency predicted higher scores on the Temperament and…

Study of the developmental relationship between language and working memory skills has only just begun, despite the prominent role of their interdependency in some theoretical accounts of developmental language impairments. Recently, Archibald and Joanisse (2009) identified children with specific language impairment (SLI), or specific working…

Objective: To examine the effects of symptoms of ADHD and ODD and cognitive functioning on social acceptance and positive bias in children. Method: The sample consisted of 86 children (49 girls) between 7 and 13 years old, recruited to reflect a wide range of ADHD symptoms. Parents and teachers reported on ADHD and ODD symptoms and social…

Adults and children (5- and 8-year-olds) performed a temporal bisection task with either auditory or visual signals and either a short (0.5-1.0s) or long (4.0-8.0s) duration range. Their working memory and attentional capacities were assessed by a series of neuropsychological tests administered in both the auditory and visual modalities. Results…

It is now well established that cannabinoid agonists such as [delta][superscript 9]-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), anandamide, and WIN 55,212-2 (WIN-2) produce potent and specific deficits in working memory (WM)/short-term memory (STM) tasks in rodents. Although mediated through activation of CB1 receptors located in memory-related brain regions such…

The relationship between object files and visual working memory (VWM) was investigated in a new paradigm combining features of traditional VWM experiments (color change detection) and object-file experiments (memory for the properties of moving objects). Object-file theory was found to account for a key component of object-position binding in VWM:…

Multitasking performance is relevant in everyday life and job analyses highlight the influence of multitasking over several diverse occupations. Intelligence is the best single predictor of overall job performance and it is also related to individual differences in multitasking. However, it has been shown that working memory capacity (WMC) is…

The present study examined whether younger and older children differ in the use of the goal-related information in a continuous performance task (AX-CPT), and if so, whether those age differences are due to the ability to represent and/or maintain goal information. Experiment 1 compared third- and sixth-grade children in their ability to transform…

Previous studies have indicated that visual working memory performance increases with age in childhood, but it is not clear why. One main hypothesis has been that younger children are less efficient in their attention; specifically, they are less able to exclude irrelevant items from working memory to make room for relevant items. We examined this…

We examined spoken sentence comprehension in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or language impairment (LI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Sentence-picture matching tasks were employed under three different working memory (WM) loads, two levels of syntactic difficulty, and two sentence lengths. Phonological short-term…

Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways,…

This investigation examined whether gender identification moderates women's working memory following exposure to situations that threaten the integrity of their gender group. Young adults read sentences that either threatened women's gender identity (in the social identity threat condition) or did not threaten this identity (in the control…

Fourteen children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and fourteen age-matched typically-developing (TD) controls were tested on an adapted version of the Twenty Questions Task (Mosher and Hornsby in Studies in cognitive growth. Wiley, New York, pp 86-102, "1966") to examine effects of content, executive and verbal IQ factors on category use in…

The Automated Working Memory Assessment battery was designed to assess verbal and visuospatial passive and active working memory processing in children and adolescents. The aim of this paper is to present the adaptation and validation of the AWMA battery to Argentinean Spanish-speaking children aged 6 to 11 years. Verbal subtests were adapted and…