Temperamentally exuberant children may be at risk for emotion regulation problems, but this may also depend on their capacity for effortful control. To examine this issue, we assessed 72 typically-developing 3- to 5-year-olds. Child exuberance, effortful control, and emotion regulation were assessed via maternal report and observations of child…

Duncan et al. (2007) presented a new methodology for identifying kindergarten readiness factors and quantifying their importance by determining which of children's developing skills measured around kindergarten entrance would predict later reading and math achievement. This article extends Duncan et al.'s work to identify kindergarten readiness…

A number of studies have documented the cognitive outcomes associated with bilingualism. To gain a clear understanding of the extent and diversity of these cognitive outcomes, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of studies that examined the cognitive correlates of bilingualism. Data from 63 studies (involving 6,022 participants) were extracted…

This study examines the relationship between a critical learning outcome of behavioral fluency and endurance, by comparing the effects of two practice procedures on multiplication facts two through nine. The first procedure, called whole time practice trial, consisted of an uninterrupted 1 minute practice time. The second procedure, endurance…

Universities and colleges are very interested in understanding the factors that influence their students' academic performance. This paper describes a study that was conducted at a mid-sized public university in the mid-south, USA, to examine this issue. In this study, the 10-scale, Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI) (Weinstein et…

In daily life (e.g., in the work environment) people are often distracted by stimuli that are clearly irrelevant to the current task and should be ignored. In contrast, much applied distraction research has focused on task interruptions by information that requires a response and therefore cannot be ignored. Moreover, the most commonly used…

Sustained attention is modulated by the neurotransmitter noradrenaline. The balance of dopamine and noradrenaline in the cortex is controlled by the DBH gene. The principal variant in this gene is a C/T change at position-1021, and the T allele at this locus is hypothesised to result in a slower rate of dopamine to noradrenaline conversion than…

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in sustained attention in infancy, the temperamental trait behavioral inhibition in childhood, and social behavior in adolescence. The authors assessed 9-month-old infants using an interrupted-stimulus attention paradigm. Behavioral inhibition was subsequently assessed in the…

Selective attention has been hypothesized to reduce distractor interference at both perceptual and postperceptual levels (Lavie, 2005), respectively, by focusing perceptual resources on the attended location and by blocking at postperceptual levels distractors that survive perceptual selection. This study measured the impact of load on these…

Ocular motor abnormalities are a common feature of multiple sclerosis (MS), with more salient deficits reflecting tissue damage within brainstem and cerebellar circuits. However, MS may also result in disruption to higher level or cognitive control processes governing eye movement, including attentional processes that enhance the neural processing…

We investigated the relation of two dimensions of attentional functioning (sustained auditory attention and resource capacity/allocation) and complex sentence comprehension of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a group of typically developing (TD) children matched for age. Twenty-six school-age children with SLI and 26 TD peers…

Previous research suggests that action video game play improves attentional resources, allowing gamers to better allocate their attention across both space and time. In order to further characterize the plastic changes resulting from playing these video games, we administered the Attentional Network Test (ANT) to action game players and…

The purpose of this study was to develop a model for employer training to manage employees who possess counter-productive behaviors. With the increasing encouragement for employers to hire without discriminating, the number of individuals with disabilities in the workforce will rise. There is limited training in universities and businesses to…

Although stress is frequently claimed to impede foreign language (FL) reading comprehension, it is usually not explained how. We investigated the effects of stress, working memory (WM) capacity, and inferential complexity on Spanish FL readers' inferential processing during comprehension. Inferences, although necessary for reading comprehension,…

A model of cognitive control in task switching is developed in which controlled performance depends on the system maintaining access to a code in episodic memory representing the most recently cued task. The main constraint on access to the current task code is proactive interference from old task codes. This interference and the mechanisms that…