Taking into consideration the unique relational position of convenors (Chairs) in PhD oral examinations, this qualitative study explores insights from 55 convenors at a research-intensive university in New Zealand into the ways academic staff developers can better prepare doctoral supervisors and examiners for oral examinations. One striking…

Empirical evidence collected so far has revealed that the bilingual advantage cannot be reduced to a single component of the executive functioning, and point to the need to understand the effects of bilingual experience on cognition as influencing a wider family of mental processes, including, but not limited to, cognitive control. The present…

Intraindividual variability (IIV) in cognitive speed, or moment-to-moment changes in ability, is a developmental phenomenon indicative of neurological integrity that increases gradually across adulthood. Past research has shown that IIV negatively covaries with cognitive performance, in which higher IIV at one occasion is associated with poorer…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine whether the word-learning challenges associated with developmental language disorder (DLD) result from encoding or retention deficits. Method In Study 1, 59 postsecondary students with DLD and 60 with normal development (ND) took the California Verbal Learning Test-Second Edition, Adult Version…

This study investigates the effect of familiar musical distractors on the cognitive performance of introverts and extraverts. Participants completed a verbal, numerical and logic test in three music conditions: vocal music, instrumental music and silence. It was predicted that introverts would perform worse with vocal music, better with…

The relationships between processing speed, intelligence, and school achievement were analyzed on a sample of 184 Russian 16-year-old students. Two speeded tasks required the discrimination of simple geometrical shapes and the recognition of the presented meaningless figures. Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and the verbal subtests of…

The remote associates test (RAT) is a complex verbal task with associations to both creative thought and general intelligence. RAT problems require not only lateral associations and the internal production of many words but a convergent focus on a single answer. Complex problem-solving of this sort may thus require both substantial verbal…

A central question in creativity concerns how insightful ideas emerge. Anecdotal examples of insightful scientific and technical discoveries include Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization of rubber, and Mendeleev's realization that there may be gaps as he tried to arrange the elements into the Periodic Table. Although most people would regard…

Turner syndrome (TS) is a relatively common neurogenetic disorder characterized by complete or partial monosomy-X in a phenotypic female. TS is associated with a cognitive profile that typically includes intact intellectual function and verbal abilities with relative weaknesses in visual-spatial, executive, and social cognitive domains. In this…

The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children's vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using phonological working memory, which is seen as a critical component in the learning of new words. However, no detailed specification of the link between phonological working memory and long-term memory…

Just as the Raven Progressive Matrices Test was uncorrelated in this sample with other measures of intelligence so was it much less well predicted from several information processing measures. It was found that verbal performance, indicated by a vocabulary score, was highly predictable from measures of information processing. While preserving…

Although a verbal intelligence test is directly a measure of what people know, it is indirectly a way of identifying people who can code and manipulate verbal stimuli rapidly in situations in which knowledge per se is not a major factor. (Author/BJG)

Twenty-four four-year-old children were given a perceptual task (color matching), a memory task (color recognition), and a verbal task (color naming). The relation between the children's performance on the nonverbal and verbal tasks was demonstrated by the fact that nearly all the matching and recognition responses, even when incorrect, were from…

The effects of delaying an immediate test, a rehearsal opportunity, or a second presentation on long-term free recall were investigated in an experiment combining features of the Brown-Peterson and free-recall paradigms. A proposed model assumes that both repetitions and tests promote learning. (CHK)

Investigated digit repetition in unilaterally and bilaterally brain-damaged adults to study the hemispheric and neuropsychological factors that underlie performance. Digit repetition was disproportionately depressed in such patients. The data suggest a differential function hypothesis, as well as a unilateral hemispheric hypothesis that underlies…