Theory-driven and practice-driven research are often separated, but in this article we shall argue for a research approach that is theory-driven but practice-oriented and shares features with the specific kind of early childhood education pedagogy this research approach has generated, what we refer to as developmental pedagogy (Pramling Samuelsson…

Research suggests that visual selective attention develops across childhood. However, there is relatively little understanding of the neurological changes that accompany this development, particularly in the context of adult theories of selective attention, such as N. Lavie's (1995) perceptual load theory of attention. This study examined visual…

Informant- and gender-specific characteristics of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and how these might relate to patterns of comorbidity need to be further clarified. We collected data from 7,007 children (aged 7-9) who participated in the Bergen Child Study (BCS), an ongoing population-based study of children's development and mental health. A…

This study focused on the motivations and discernment leading to the transformational leadership approach and showed there is continuing momentum in the area towards mindful engagement to build trust in a school culture. The purpose of the study was to investigate how transformational leaders build a culture through trust and commitment within a…

This study examined the longitudinal associations between attentional regulation in preschool and children's school success in later elementary school within an at-risk sample (N = 2595). Specifically, two facets of attention (focused attention and lack of impulsivity) at age 5 were explored as independent predictors of children's achievement and…

The transition to college or university can be an exciting new experience for many young adults. For some, intense homesickness can make this move difficult, even unsustainable. Homesickness--defined as the distress or impairment caused by an actual or anticipated separation from home--carries the unique hallmark of preoccupying thoughts of home…

Attentional capture for distractors is enhanced by increasing the difficulty of discrimination between the standard and the target in the three-stimulus oddball paradigm. In this study, we investigated the cognitive mechanism of this modulation of attentional capture. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from participants while they…

This study investigated preparatory processes involved in adapting to changing episodic memory retrieval demands. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a general old/new recognition task and a specific task that also required retrieval of perceptual details. The relevant task remained either constant or changed…

The substantial distractor interference obtained for small displays when the target appears alone is reduced in large displays when the target is embedded among neutral letters. This finding has been interpreted as reflecting low-load and high-load processing, respectively, thereby supporting the theory of perceptual load (Lavie & Tsal, 1994).…

Complex dynamic control (CDC) tasks are a type of problem-solving environment used for examining many cognitive activities (e.g., attention, control, decision making, hypothesis testing, implicit learning, memory, monitoring, planning, and problem solving). Because of their popularity, there have been many findings from diverse domains of research…

Vision often dominates audition when attentive processes are involved (e.g., the ventriloquist effect), yet little is known about the relative potential of the two modalities to initiate a "break through of the unattended". The present study was designed to systematically compare the capacity of task-irrelevant auditory and visual events to…

Reading acquisition requires, in addition to appropriate phonological abilities, accurate and rapid selection of sublexical orthographic units by attentional letter string parsing. Spatio-temporal distribution of attentional engagement onto 3-pseudoletter strings was studied in 28 dyslexic and 55 normally reading children by measuring attentional…

Research examining the links between disorganized attachment and clinical symptoms largely has neglected middle childhood due to lack of available measurement tools. The few studies that have examined these links in other developmental phases have found higher clinical symptoms in disorganized individuals. Our study extended this research by using…

Disagreement exists about whether color-word Stroop facilitation is caused by converging information (e.g., Cohen et al., 1990; Roelofs, 2003) or inadvertent reading (MacLeod & MacDonald, 2000). Four experiments tested between these hypotheses by examining Stroop effects on response time (RT) both within and between languages. Words cannot be…

College students whose test anxiety was measured completed a working memory-intensive math exam with televised distractions. Students were provided with implementation intentions (if-then plans; Gollwitzer, 1999) designed to either help them ignore the distractions (i.e., temptation-inhibiting plans) or focus more intently on the math exam (i.e.,…