During reading acquisition children learn to recognize orthographic stimuli and link them to phonology and semantics. The present study investigated neurocognitive processes of learning to read after one year of schooling. We aimed to elucidate the cognitive processes underlying neural tuning for print that has been shown to play an important role…

Educational research has provided evidence that racial and ethnic minority students are disadvantaged in today's educational systems. Teachers' stereotypical expectations are believed to contribute to these disadvantages because teachers make decisions about grades, special education, tracking, and school placement. Research so far has shown that…

This study rank ordered the contributive importance of several predictors of listening comprehension for third, seventh, and tenth graders. Principal components analyses revealed that a three-factor solution with fluency, reasoning, and working memory components provided the best fit across grade levels. Dominance analyses indicated that fluency…

Internationally, there is growing interest in children's transition to school and their readiness for formal education. Parents' memories of school offer important insights into children's preparation for school and how families view schools; however, few studies consider the influence of educational histories. To address this gap, a sample of 24…

This study demonstrates the utility of applying a causal indicator modeling framework to investigate important predictors of reading comprehension in third, seventh, and tenth grade students. The results indicated that a 4-factor multiple indicator multiple indicator cause (MIMIC) model of reading comprehension provided adequate fit at each grade…

Working memory and attention are complex cognitive functions that are disrupted in several neuropsychiatric disorders. Mouse models of such human diseases are commonly subjected to maze-based tests that can neither distinguish between these cognitive functions nor isolate specific aspects of either function. Here, we have adapted a simple visual…

Children must acquire multiple language dimensions to ultimately achieve adult levels of language competence. Two such language dimensions, finiteness marking and the verb lexicon, are considered areas of weakness in specific language impairment (SLI). Given these weaknesses, the question arises of whether these two dimensions are related in…

In the 1st reported experiment, we demonstrate that auditory memory is robust over extended retention intervals (RIs) when listeners compare the timbre of complex tones, even when active or verbal rehearsal is difficult or impossible. Thus, our tones have an abstract timbre that resists verbal labeling, they differ across trials so that no…

Recent work (e.g., Nairne & Pandeirada, 2010) has shown that words are remembered better when they have been processed for their survival value in a grasslands context than when processed in other contexts. It has been suggested that this is because human memory systems were shaped by evolution specifically to help humans survive. Thus far,…

People often attach a higher value to an object when they own it (i.e., as seller) compared with when they do not own it (i.e., as buyer)--a phenomenon known as the "endowment effect". According to recent cognitive process accounts of the endowment effect, the effect is due to differences between sellers and buyers in information search.…

M. G. Berman, J. Jonides, and R. L. Lewis (2009) adapted the recent-probes task to investigate the causes of forgetting in short-term memory. In 7 experiments, they studied the persistence of memory traces by assessing the level of proactive interference generated by previous-trial items over a range of intertrial intervals. None of the…

Studies of incidental category learning support the hypothesis of an implicit prototype-extraction system that is distinct from explicit memory (Smith, 2008). In those studies, patients with explicit-memory impairments due to damage to the medial-temporal lobe performed normally in implicit categorization tasks (Bozoki, Grossman, & Smith, 2006;…

Identification accuracy for the second of two target (T2) is impaired when presented shortly after the first (T1). Does this attentional blink (AB) also impair the perception of the order of presentation? In four experiments, three letter targets (T1, T2, T3) were inserted in a stream of digit distractors displayed in rapid serial visual…

The memory system that supports implicit perceptual-motor sequence learning relies on brain regions that operate separately from the explicit, medial temporal lobe memory system. The implicit learning system therefore likely has distinct operating characteristics and information processing constraints. To attempt to identify the limits of the…

Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In this study, we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified…