To examine the development of visual short-term memory (VSTM) for location, we presented 6- to 12-month-old infants (N = 199) with two side-by-side stimulus streams. In each stream, arrays of colored circles continually appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. In the "changing" stream, the location of one or more items changed in each cycle; in the…

We compared the performance of twenty 5-7-year-olds on two spatial-temporal judgment tasks. In a semantic task, children located temporal distances from today that were described using conventional, temporal terms on a spatial timeline. In an autobiographical task, children judged temporal distances on the same spatial timeline for events that…

In this study, 7-19-year-olds performed an interrupted visual search task in two experiments. Our question was whether the tendency to respond within 500 ms after a second glimpse of a display (the "rapid resumption" effect ["Psychological Science", 16 (2005) 684-688]) would increase with age in the same way as overall search efficiency. The…

In this study, we investigated gender and minority achievement gaps on 8th-grade science items employing a multilevel item response methodology. Both gaps were wider on physics and earth science items than on biology and chemistry items. Larger gender gaps were found on items with specific topics favoring male students than other items, for…

The papers in the monograph address different topics related to mathematics teaching and learning processes which are of great interest to both students and prospective teachers. Some papers open new research questions, some show examples of good practice and others provide more information about earlier findings. The monograph consists of six…

Many studies propose that chess is a game requiring cognitive skills and has positive effects on mental development. In recent years, chess training has also been emphasised as important during the early childhood period. However, no studies have been done with six-year-old children. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not…

Background: Children with specific language impairment (CwSLI) are consistently reported to have short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) difficulties. Aim: To compare STM and WM abilities in CwSLI with children with pragmatic language impairment (CwPLI). Methods & Procedures: Primary school-aged CwSLI (n = 12) and CwPLI (n = 23) were…

The aim of this research was to examine age-related differences in young and older adults in route learning, using different types of learning and recall test modalities. A sample of young adults (20-30 years old) and older adults (60-70 years old) learned a city route by using either a map or a description; they then performed a verification…

We validate an eye-tracking method applicable for studying memory processes in complex cognitive tasks. The method is tested with a task on probabilistic inferences from memory. It provides valuable data on the time course of processing, thus clarifying previous results on heuristic probabilistic inference. Participants learned cue values of…

Voluntary shifts of attention are often motivated in experimental contexts by using well-known symbols that accurately predict the direction of targets. The authors report 3 experiments, which showed that the presentation of predictive spatial information does not provide sufficient incentive to elicit voluntary shifts of attention. For instance,…

Learning sequential structures is of fundamental importance for a wide variety of human skills. While it has long been debated whether implicit sequence learning is perceptual or response-based, here we propose an alternative framework that cuts across this dichotomy and assumes that sequence learning rests on associative changes that can occur…

An important issue for understanding visual perception in autism concerns whether individuals with this neurodevelopmental disorder possess an advantage in processing local visual information, and if so, what is the nature of this advantage. Perception of movement speed is a visual process that relies on computation of local spatiotemporal signals…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

Aim: To investigate the psychiatric and cognitive phenotype in young individuals with the childhood form of myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1). Method: Twenty-eight individuals (15 females, 13 males) with childhood DM1 (mean age 17y, SD 4.6, range 7-24y) were assessed using standardized instruments and cognitive testing of general intelligence,…

In this experiment we studied the effect of goal setting on the strategies used to perform a block design task called SAMUEL. SAMUEL can measure many indicators, which are then combined to determine the strategies used by participants when solving SAMUEL problems. Two experimental groups were created: one group was given an explicit, difficult…