Although adult learners (aged 25-34) have comprised over 33% of all enrolled students in US institutions of higher education, researchers have consistently found adult learners are under-supported by federal and institutional financial aid, leading these students to experience high dropout rates and low graduation rates. To better understand what…

This study examined functional changes longitudinally over 2 years in neural correlates associated with working memory in youth with and without autism spectrum disorder, and the impact of increasing cognitive load. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a visuo-spatial 1-back task with four levels of difficulty. A total of 14 children…

This study investigated whether the effect of exposure to code-switching on bilingual children's language performance varied depending on verbal working memory (WM). A large sample of school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children (N = 174, Mage = 7.78) was recruited, and children were administered language measures in English and Spanish. The…

Learning a new language entails various challenges, one of these is grasping the vocabulary of the language. A significant way to tackle the problem is to motivate students to become independent learners during the progression of second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Thus, this study intended to explore the use of different vocabulary learning…

One hundred sixty-five Hong Kong Chinese children were administered measures of early mathematics, visual-spatial skills, and executive functioning (working memory, inhibition, shifting, updating) once in kindergarten (mean age = 62.80 months, SD = 3.74) and again in first grade (mean age = 77.25 months, SD = 4.60). In kindergarten, visual-spatial…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

Numerous investigations have definitively shown amygdalar involvement in delay and contextual fear conditioning. However, much less is known about amygdala contributions to trace fear conditioning, and what little evidence exists is conflicting as noted in previous studies. This discrepancy may result from selective targeting of individual nuclei…

In "Drosophila," prior fighting experience influences the outcome of later contests: losing a fight increases the probability of losing second contests, thereby revealing "loser" effects that involve learning and memory. In these experiments, to generate and quantify the behavioral changes observed as consequences of losing…

Verbal memory is a fundamental prerequisite for language learning. This study investigated 7-month-olds' (N = 62) ability to remember the identity and order of elements in a multisyllabic word. The results indicate that infants detect changes in the order of edge syllables, or the identity of the middle syllables, but fail to encode the order…

Habituation is the simplest form of learning, but we know little about the transcriptional mechanisms that encode long-term habituation memory. A key obstacle is that habituation is relatively stimulus-specific and is thus encoded in small sets of neurons, providing poor signal/noise ratios for transcriptional analysis. To overcome this obstacle,…

Recognition memory deficits, even after short delays, are sometimes observed following hippocampal damage. One hypothesis links the hippocampus with processes in updating contextual memory representation. Here, we used fornix transection, which partially disconnects the hippocampal system, and compares the performance of fornix-transected monkeys…

Norepinephrine (NE) is a key modulator of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, a brain structure crucially involved in memory formation. NE boosts synaptic plasticity mostly through initiation of signaling cascades downstream from beta (ß)-adrenergic receptors (ß-ARs). Previous studies demonstrated that a ß-adrenergic receptor agonist,…

Divided attention during encoding typically produces marked reductions in later memory. The attentional boost effect (ABE) is a surprising variation on this phenomenon. In this paradigm, each study stimulus (e.g., a word) is presented along with a target or a distractor (e.g., different colored circles) in a detection task. Later memory is better…

Efficient memory is one of the necessary cognitive potentials required for virtually every form of lifelong learning. In this contribution we first briefly review and summarize state of the art of knowledge on memory and related cognitive functions in normal aging. Then we critically discuss a relatively short inventory of clinical, psychometric,…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…