Brain aging has been associated with both reduced and increased neural activity during task execution. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether increased neural activation during memory encoding and retrieval is already present at the age of 60 as well as to obtain more insight into the mechanism behind increased activity.…

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this article, the author considers findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application. He examines how technology has…

We examined how maternal strategic behaviors during a mother-child collaborative sort-recall task of categorically similar items related to children's recall and children's strategic behavior in a sort-recall task that they completed independently. Mother-child dyads participated in the collaborative sort-recall task when children were 40 months…

Two experiments compared the effects of depth of processing on working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM) using a levels-of-processing (LOP) span task, a newly developed WM span procedure that involves processing to-be-remembered words based on their visual, phonological, or semantic characteristics. Depth of processing had minimal effect on…

Previous studies using judgments of morphosyntactic errors have shown mixed evidence for a critical period for L2 acquisition (e.g., Birdsong & Molis, Journal of Memory and Language 44: 235-249, 2001, Johnson & Newport, Cognitive Psychology 21: 60-99, 1989). This study uses anomalies in the domain of information structure, the interface…

Aim: To study the development of motor speed and associated movements in participants aged 5 to 18 years for age, sex, and laterality. Method: Ten motor tasks of the Zurich Neuromotor Assessment (repetitive and alternating movements of hands and feet, repetitive and sequential finger movements, the pegboard, static and dynamic balance,…

Background: Progressive myelination during adolescence implicates an increased vulnerability to neurotoxic substances and enduring neurocognitive consequences. This study examined the cognitive manifestations of altered white matter microstructure in chronic marijuana and alcohol-using (MJ + ALC) adolescents. Methods: Thirty-six MJ + ALC…

After an oral free recall task, participants were interviewed about their memory. Despite reporting similar levels of perceived personal control over memory, older and young adults differed in the means in which they believed memory could be controlled. Older adults cited health and wellness practices and exercising memory, consistent with a "use…

Raising children with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities is considered to be extremely difficult for parents, but figures on the content and amount of time needed for the caring task of parents is lacking. Data on what the caring task actually means (in terms of amount of time and type of task) is needed to be able to understand the…

Knowledge about the functional status of the frontal cortex in infancy is limited. This study investigated the effects of polymorphisms in four dopamine system genes on performance in a task developed to assess such functioning, the Freeze-Frame task, at 9 months of age. Polymorphisms in the catechol-O-methyltransferase ("COMT") and the…

This study explored the second language perceptual accuracy of Japanese geminates (moraic units) by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels: beginner (28), low-intermediate (42), and advanced (15). Stimuli included singleton and geminate /t/, /k/, /s/ followed by /a/ or /u/ produced by a native speaker in isolated words and carrier…

In two studies we investigated 2-year-old children's answers to predicate-focus questions depending on the preceding context. Children were presented with a successive series of short video clips showing transitive actions (e.g., frog washing duck) in which either the action (action-new) or the patient (patient-new) was the changing, and therefore…

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children's analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children…

Self-efficacy has been closely linked to teacher performance of instructional tasks. Previous studies on teacher self-efficacy focused on general activities and were less specific regarding special education teachers' perceived ability to perform a given task. The purpose of this quantitative correlation study was to evaluate high school special…

Problem solving plays an important role in mathematics and should have a prominent role in the mathematics education. The term "problem solving" refers to mathematics tasks that have the potential to provide intellectual challenges for enhancing students' mathematical understanding and development. In addition, the contextual problem…