Some children struggle with mathematics. Among these children, some of them may be learners with mathematical difficulties. While research has revealed multiple deficits as candidate causes for mathematical difficulties and probable subtypes, the cognitive profiles of these subtypes are not fully understood. Moreover, we have yet to discover…

Executive function (EF) is a term used to describe the processes responsible for purposeful, goal-directed behavior and has been described as the "air traffic controller" or "CEO" of the brain. EFs are an important factor in overall quality of life, including school and job success. EFs are measured predominately through two…

Developed as a tool to assess working memory capacity in rodents, the odor span task (OST) has significant potential to advance drug discovery in animal models of psychiatric disorders. Prior investigations indicate OST performance is impaired by systemic administration of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDA-r) antagonists and is sensitive to…

A wealth of studies have investigated numerical abilities in infants and in children aged 3 or above, but research on pre-counting toddlers is sparse. Here we devised a novel version of an imitation task that was previously used to assess spontaneous focusing on numerosity (i.e. the predisposition to grasp numerical properties of the environment)…

Prior research suggests that individuals recruit a disease-avoidance system designed to avoid sources of illness through threat detection and memory. Our study evaluated whether disease-related memory benefits reflect the distinctive/salient nature of a diseased state versus the infectious nature of a disease by comparing memory for objects…

We investigated students' knowledge and beliefs about the impact of using three-dimensional (3D) multimedia presentations. Students listened to a lecture about the ventricular system, which was presented alone (Experiment 1 only) or with a 3D or a 2D video illustrating the system. Afterwards, students judged how well they would perform on a…

Research suggests that sleep preferentially consolidates the negative aspects of memories at the expense of the neutral aspects. However, the mechanisms by which sleep facilitates this emotional memory trade-off remain unknown. Although active processes associated with sleep-dependent memory consolidation have been proposed to underlie this…

The present study examined the role of executive function in lying for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The temptation resistance paradigm was used to elicit children's self-protective lies and the Hide-and-seek task was used to elicit children's self-benefiting lies. Results showed that children with ASD told fewer lies in the two…

Two studies sought to replicate and extend the seductive effect of decorative pictures in expository text comprehension to an e-learning environment. In the first study, undergraduate students read and answered questions about two texts, with and without decorative, irrelevant images, in an e-learning course. The presence of decorative images had…

This study investigated creative thinking abilities among two groups of 20 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) compared to 20 children with typical development ages 9-11. The study compared performance on two different creativity tests: general creativity (Pictorial Multiple Solutions-PMS) test versus mathematical creativity (Creating…

Spatial memory, the aspect of memory involving encoding and retrieval of information regarding one's environment and spatial orientation, is a complex biological function incorporating multiple neuronal networks. Hippocampus-dependent spatial memory is not innate and emerges during development in both humans and rodents. In children,…

Attempting to guess an answer to a memory question has repeatedly been shown to benefit memory for the answer compared to merely reading what the answer is, even when the guess is incorrect. In this study, we investigate 2 potential explanations for this effect in a single experimental procedure. According to the semantic explanation, the benefits…

Honeybees are a standard model for the study of appetitive learning and memory. Yet, fewer attempts have been performed to characterize aversive learning and memory in this insect and uncover its molecular underpinnings. Here, we took advantage of the positive phototactic behavior of bees kept away from the hive in a dark environment and…

To determine the effect of physical activity (PA) on three differing types of cognitive processes, within an under-researched segment of the population, 77 college-aged students were recruited from a university in the southwestern United States. These participants completed three computer-driven tests from a battery of measurements that assess…

An unresolved issue regarding working memory (WM) processes relates to whether domain-general attentional resources are required to form and store bound representations. Recent evidence suggests that visual WM performance during tasks that require binding of face-scene pairs is disrupted by concurrent divided attention to a greater degree than…