Theories of childhood amnesia and autobiographical memory development have been based on the assumption that the age estimates of earliest childhood memories are generally accurate, with an average age of 3.5 years among adults. It is also commonly believed that early memories will by default become inaccessible later on and this eventually…

Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to adapt to situations in which rewards and goals change. Potentially addictive drugs may impair flexible decision-making by altering brain mechanisms that compute reward expectancies, thereby facilitating maladaptive drug use. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested the effects of oxycodone exposure on…

The effects of parent-child conversation and object manipulation on children's learning, transfer of knowledge, and memory were examined in two museum exhibits and conversations recorded at home. Seventy-eight children (M[subscript age] = 4.9) and their parents were randomly assigned to receive conversation cards featuring elaborative…

Educators often face serious time constraints that impede multiple repetition lessons on the same material. Thus, it would be useful to know when to schedule a single repetition unit to maximize memory performance. Laboratory studies revealed that the length of the retention interval (i.e., the time between the last learning session and the final…

Four experiments examined the interplay of memory and creative cognition, showing that attempting to think of new uses for an object can cause the forgetting of old uses. Specifically, using an adapted version of the Alternative Uses Task (Guilford, 1957), participants studied several uses for a variety of common household objects before…

People with developmental dyslexia (DD) have been shown to be impaired in tasks that require the processing of multiple visual elements in parallel. It has been suggested that this deficit originates from disturbed visual attentional functions. The parameter-based assessment of visual attention based on Bundesen's (1990) theory of visual…

Attempting to retrieve information from memory enhances subsequent learning even if the retrieval attempt is unsuccessful. Recent evidence suggests that this benefit materializes only if subsequent study occurs immediately after the retrieval attempt. Previous studies have prompted retrieval using a cue (e.g., "whale-???") that has no…

Research examining cognition and science learning has focused on working memory, but evidence implicates a broader set of executive functions. The current study examined executive functions and learning of biology in young adolescents. Fifty-six participants, aged 12-13?years, completed tasks of working memory (Spatial Working Memory), inhibition…

In this study, we explored how mothers' school-related identities influence their current expectations of school identities for their children using a possible selves framework. Forty-seven mothers of preschool-aged children participated in semi-structured interviews about their school-related histories and children's school preparation.…

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to determine (a) whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It…

Freedom movements historically have shown power to transform social and personal identity. Absorbing the narrative of a movement can lead to something not unlike conversion. Accepting the truth of a movement's story implies change in who one believes oneself to be and may reorient one's life story. Movements like Cesar Chavez's…

Working memory (WM) generally refers to the human ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate a limited amount of information in immediate consciousness when carrying out complex cognitive tasks such as problem-solving and language comprehension. Though much controversy has surrounded the WM concept since its inception by Baddeley & Hitch…

Background: Response inhibition, working memory, and response variability are possible endophenotypes of ADHD based on their association with the disorder and evidence of heritability. One of the critical although rarely studied criteria for a valid endophenotype is that it persists despite waxing and waning of the overt manifestations of the…

"Progressive education" is a term more often used than fully understood. Generations of authors have attempted to settle on a definition for this term, generally by looking to the work of John Dewey around the turn of the 20th century. Many have noted the variety of interpretations of this ideology, with some arguing that no single…

Environmental enrichment (EE) has marked beneficial effects on cognitive capacity. Given the possibility that this form of neuronal plasticity could function via the actuation of the same cellular signaling pathways that underlie learning/memory formation, we examined whether the MAPK cascade effector, mitogen/stress-activated kinase 1 (MSK1),…