Introduction: Attentional Efficiency (AE) is defined as the accuracy with which a child discriminates, from a group of similar stimuli, those which are identical to a model, within a certain time period. Various factors may be associated with a higher or lower AE, among which is socioeconomic context. The goals of this study were: 1) To describe…

This study evaluated the effects of a behavioral summer treatment program for children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD). Twenty boys (M = 9.2 years) diagnosed with HFASD participated in the 6-week program across 6 years. Detailed daily behavioral data were collected on a variety of positive and negative social behaviors.…

This study is aimed at identifying both prospects and problems of using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching reading comprehension in English as Second Language. To achieve this aim, a total of 25 secondary school English teachers were interviewed through the use of questionnaire. The teachers were purposively and…

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) are less successful in school than their peers. In order for teachers and researchers to effectively partner to identify and support these students, they must focus on the same problem behaviors. This research identified six components of EBD commonly identified in research literature:…

We determined how various cognitive abilities, including several measures of a proposed domain-specific number sense, relate to mathematical competence in nearly 100 9-year-old children with normal reading skill. Results are consistent with an extended number processing network and suggest that important processing nodes of this network are…

Some people are better readers than others, and this variation in comprehension ability is predicted by measures of working memory capacity (WMC). The primary goal of this study was to investigate the mediating role of mind-wandering experiences in the association between WMC and normal individual differences in reading comprehension, as predicted…

Although models of visual search have often assumed that attention can only be set for a single feature or property at a time, recent studies have suggested that it may be possible to maintain more than one attentional control setting. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether spatial attention could be guided by multiple attentional…

Tests of working memory capacity (WMC) and fluid intelligence (gF) are thought to capture variability in a crucial cognitive capacity that is broadly predictive of success, yet pinpointing the exact nature of this capacity is an area of ongoing controversy. We propose that mind-wandering is associated with performance on tests of WMC and gF,…

Recent evidence suggests adults and infants selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object. The current research investigated whether this bias stems from infants' processing of the functional consequences of grasps: understanding that different grasps afford different future actions. A habituation paradigm…

This study examined the effect of background music upon performance of creative and non-creative individuals on a reading comprehension task. In the presence of musical distraction and silence, 54 individuals (27 creative) carried out reading comprehension tasks in a repeated measures design. An interaction was predicted, such that musical…

Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation…

The deterioration of performance over time is characteristic for sustained attention tasks. This so-called "performance decrement" is measured by the increase of reaction time (RT) over time. Some behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms of this phenomenon are not yet fully understood. Behaviourally, we examined the increase of RT over time and…

This paper presents the results of preliminary research on the assessment of reasoning abilities in primary school poor achievers vs. normal achievers using computer game tasks. Subjects were evaluated by means of cognitive assessment on logical abilities and academic skills. The aim of this study is to better understand the relationship between…

To evaluate the effectiveness of mindfulness-based structured versus unstructured coloring on test anxiety, 52 participants (53.8% female; M[subscript age] = 10.92 years, SD = 0.82) were randomly assigned to either a structured mandala (n = 26) or free coloring condition (n = 26), and completed a standardized anxiety measure to assess anxiety…

The ability to flexibly allocate attention to goal-relevant information is pivotal for the completion of high-level cognitive processes. For instance, in comprehending illustrated texts, the reader permanently has to switch the attentional focus between the text and the corresponding picture in order to extract relevant information from both…