Phonological processing skills predict early reading development, but what underlies developing phonological processing skills? Phonological representations of 140 native Cantonese-speaking Chinese children (age 4-10) were assessed with speech gating, mispronunciation detection, and nonword repetition tasks; their nonverbal IQ, reading, and…

Recently much attention has been paid to the history of the discovery of Hubble's law--the linear relation between the rate of recession of the remote galaxies and distance to them from Earth. Though historians of cosmology now mention several names associated with this law instead of just one, the motivation of each actor of that remarkable…

Our visual brain is remarkable in extracting invariant properties from the noisy environment, guiding selection of where to look and what to identify. However, how the brain achieves this is still poorly understood. Here we explore interactions of local context and global structure in the long-term learning and retrieval of invariant display…

Research has shown links between motor proficiency and cognition in school-age children, however, few have explored earlier ages. We aimed to determine the association between motor proficiency and cognitive ability in four-year-olds. Motor and cognitive skills were examined in 32 (15 males, 17 females) four-year-olds (±5.59 months) using the…

Evidence that rapid naming skill is associated with reading ability has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. However, there is considerable variation in the literature concerning the magnitude of this relationship. The objective of the present study was to provide a comprehensive analysis of the evidence on the relationship between rapid…

Researchers suggest that musical training prepares the mind for learning; however, there are many obstacles to the implementation of research to practice in music education. The purpose of this article is to apply key principles of mind brain education to music education and to evaluate how music prepares the mind for learning. Practical teaching…

The match between a student's academic ability and the academic ability of the student's peers has been found to exert influence on student educational aspirations. Research on this has garnered mixed results with some finding that students whose peers have higher ability are more likely to develop a poor self-concept and lower their academic…

As youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are more likely to experience anxiety than youth in the general population, investigation of associated factors is important for diagnosis and treatment. The present study extended prior research by examining factors associated with caregiver-reported anxiety in 2662 youth (mean age = 8.82 years) with…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

Allocentric spatial memory, the memory for locations coded in relation to objects comprising our environment, is a fundamental component of episodic memory and is dependent on the integrity of the hippocampal formation in adulthood. Previous research from different laboratories reported that basic allocentric spatial memory abilities are reliably…

A major debate in the mental-rotation literature concerns the question of whether objects are represented holistically during rotation. Effects of object complexity on rotational speed are considered strong evidence against such holistic representations. In Experiment 1, such an effect of object complexity was markedly present. A closer look on…

This paper outlines the new opportunities that that will be changing the landscape of geometry education at the primary school level. These include: the research on spatial reasoning and its connection to school mathematics in general and school geometry in particular; the function of drawing in the construction of geometric meaning; the role of…

What is the developmental course of children's gender constancy? Do other cognitive abilities such as time comprehension and false-belief understanding foster gender constancy and the subcomponents gender stability and gender consistency? We examined the development of gender constancy and its relation to time comprehension and false-belief…

This study describes the experiences of a researcher negotiating consent with people with learning disabilities to become participants in a research study. The study was about how the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) was applied to everyday decision-making in social care settings. However, before data collection could begin, the researcher had to follow…

Whether gaze following--a key component of joint attention--is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is currently debated. Functional gaze following involves saccading towards the attended rather than unattended targets (accuracy) as well as a subsequent processing bias for attended objects. Using non-invasive eye tracking…