The interactions between emotion and attention are complex due to the multifaceted nature of attention. Adding to this complexity, the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the emotional landscape, broadly heightening health and financial concerns. Can the heightened concerns about COVID-19 impair one or more of the components of attention? To explore the…

Working memory (WM) has a limited capacity; however, this limitation can be mitigated by selecting individual items from the set currently held in WM for prioritization. The selection mechanism underlying this prioritization ability is referred to as the focus of attention (FOA) in WM. Although impressive progress has been achieved in recent…

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…

This study provides evidence connecting two aspects of visual-orthographic skills (orthographic awareness and delayed copying) to the common variance shared by Chinese word reading and arithmetic calculation, as well as in identifying positional knowledge of numbers as a potential mediator of these connections in Chinese primary school students (N…

Recent research suggests that bilinguals might exhibit advantages in several areas of executive function, including working memory, inhibitory control, and attentional control. However, few studies have examined potential bilingual advantages within lower socioeconomic status (SES) populations. Here we addressed this gap in the literature by…

The purpose of the study is to examine the role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated science texts. Thirty-five fourth/fifth elementary students read two science texts. Prior knowledge and retention/transfer learning outcomes were measured using researcher-developed measures. While reading, students' eye movements…

The present study aimed to investigate early interrelationships between temperament, short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM), while also relating them to incipient anxious traits in a sample of 4-7-year-olds. Preschoolers were evaluated using verbal and visuospatial STM and WM tasks, while parental reports were used to assess children's…

Mathematical giftedness (MG) is an intriguing phenomenon, the nature of which has yet to be sufficiently explored. This study goes a step further in understanding how MG is related to expertise in mathematics (EM) and general giftedness (G). Cognitive testing was conducted among 197 high school students with different levels of G and of EM. Based…

How does developing attentional control operate within visual short-term memory (VSTM)? Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults (total n = 205) were asked to report whether probe items were part of preceding visual arrays. In Experiment 1, central or peripheral cues oriented attention to the location of to-be-probed items either prior to…

By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is…

The ability to flexibly allocate attention to goal-relevant information is pivotal for the completion of high-level cognitive processes. For instance, in comprehending illustrated texts, the reader permanently has to switch the attentional focus between the text and the corresponding picture in order to extract relevant information from both…

The relevance of the investigated problem is caused by the fact that most children who start to study do not have a good level of higher mental functions. It leads to difficulties at school and health problems. The article aims at estimating the level of higher mental functions and the degree of educational motivation development among…

The role of frontal cortex in selective attention to visual distractors was examined in an attentional capture task in which participants searched for a unique shape in the presence or absence of an additional colour singleton distractor. The presence of the additional singleton was associated with slower behavioural responses to the shape target,…

Background: We may improve our understanding of the role of common versus unique risk factors in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by examining ADHD-related cognitive deficits in single- (SPX), and multi-incidence (MPX) families. Given that individuals from multiplex (MPX) families are likely to share genetic vulnerability for the…

Although the perceptual load theory of attention has stimulated a great deal of research, evidence for the role of perceptual load in determining perception has typically relied on indirect measures that infer perception from distractor effects on reaction times or neural activity (see N. Lavie, 2005, for a review). Here we varied the level of…