Background: We prospectively followed an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of girls with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (n = 140) and a matched comparison sample (n = 88) from childhood through young adulthood to evaluate developmental trajectories of executive functions (EF) and associations between EF trajectories…

Few adult second language (L2) learners successfully attain high-level proficiency. Although decades of research on beginning to intermediate stages of L2 learning have identified a number of predictors of the rate of acquisition, little research has examined factors relevant to predicting very high levels of L2 proficiency. The current study,…

Although autobiographical memory specificity is an important developmental feature fostering adaptation throughout life, little is known about factors related to interindividual differences in autobiographical memory specificity. The current study investigated associations with early adolescents' communication with mother about their experiences…

This essay derives from a course called ‘"The Rhetoric of Native America,’" which is a historical-critical survey of Native American primary texts. The course examines the rhetoric employed by Natives to enact social change and to build community in the face of exigencies. The main goal of exploring a native text (particularly, Simon…

The attainment of basic early literacy skills at an early age is one way to ensure children become proficient readers as adults. Word recognition is an important basic early literacy skill that is related to reading fluency and overall reading competency. Incremental rehearsal (IR) is a flashcard technique that has produced strong outcomes for a…

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…

Visual and auditory verbal learning using a selective reminding format was studied in a mixed clinical sample of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 42), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (n = 83), velocardiofacial syndrome (n = 17) and neurotypicals (n = 38) using the Test of Memory and Learning to (1) more thoroughly…

Prior work on organization in free recall has focused on the ways in which semantic and temporal information determine the order in which material is retrieved from memory. Tulving's theory of ecphory suggests that these organizational effects arise from the interaction of a retrieval cue with the contents of memory. Using the…

The authors provide evidence that long-term memory encoding can occur for briefly viewed objects in a rapid serial visual presentation list, contrary to claims that the brief presentation and quick succession of objects prevent encoding by disrupting a memory consolidation process that requires hundreds of milliseconds of uninterrupted processing.…

A conditioned stimulus (CS) exposure has the ability to induce two qualitatively different mnesic processes: memory reconsolidation and memory extinction. Previous work from our laboratory has shown that upon a single CS presentation the triggering of one or the other process depends on CS duration (short CS exposure triggers reconsolidation,…

How can a task-appropriate response be selected for an ambiguous target stimulus in task-switching situations? One answer is to use compound cue retrieval, whereby stimuli serve as joint retrieval cues to select a response from long-term memory. In the present study, the authors tested how well a model of compound cue retrieval could account for a…

The human ability to focus memory retrieval operations on a particular list, episode or memory structure has not been fully appreciated or documented. In Experiment 1-3, we make it increasingly difficult for participants to switch between a less recent list (multiple study opportunities), and a more recent list (single study opportunity). Task…

In DeCaro et al. [DeCaro, M. S., Thomas, R. D., & Beilock, S. L. (2008). "Individual differences in category learning: Sometimes less working memory capacity is better than more." "Cognition, 107," 284-294] we demonstrated that sometimes less working memory (WM) has its advantages. The lower individuals' WM, the faster they achieved success on an…

Temporal distinctiveness models of memory retrieval claim that memories are organised partly in terms of their positions along a temporal dimension, and suggest that memory retrieval involves temporal discrimination. According to such models the retrievability of memories should be related to the discriminability of their temporal distances at the…

An incubation effect occurs when taking a break from a problem helps solvers arrive at the correct solution more often than working on it continuously. The forgetting-fixation account, a popular explanation of how incubation works, posits that a break from a problem allows the solver to forget the incorrect path to the solution and finally access…