Recently, the nature of children's mental number line has received much investigation. In the number line task, children are required to mark a presented number on a physical number line with fixed endpoints. Typically, it was observed that the estimations of younger/inexperienced children were accounted for best by a logarithmic function, whereas…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether and which aspects of a concurrent motor activity can facilitate children's and adults' performance in a dynamic imagery task. Children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds) and adults were asked to tilt empty glasses, filled with varied amounts of imaginary water, so that the imagined water would reach the rim.…

Although it has been proposed that the ability to compare numerical magnitudes is related to mathematics achievement, it is not clear whether this ability "predicts" individual differences in later mathematics achievement. The current study addressed this question in typically developing children by means of a longitudinal design that examined the…

The brain exhibits remarkable facility in exerting attentional control in most circumstances, but it also suffers apparent limitations in others. The authors' goal is to construct a rational account for why attentional control appears suboptimal under conditions of conflict and what this implies about the underlying computational principles. The…

In the stop-signal paradigm, fast responses are harder to inhibit than slow responses, so subjects must balance speed is the go task with successful stopping in the stop task. In theory, subjects achieve this balance by adjusting response thresholds for the go task, making proactive adjustments in response to instructions that indicate that…

This study assessed the efficiency of a model of a familiar urban area for enhancing knowledge of the spatial environment by adults with visual impairments. It found a significant improvement in knowledge of spatial configuration after exposure to the model, suggesting that models are powerful means of developing cognitive mapping in people who…

Two experiments were conducted to compare the false belief understanding of children who have no siblings, but have classmates of different ages in kindergarten. In Experiment 1, 4- and 5-year-olds completed two unexpected location tasks. We found that 4-year-olds with classmates of different ages performed significantly better than those with…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of executive functions (EF) in theory-of-mind (ToM) performance in deaf children and adolescents. Four groups of deaf children aged 7-16 years, with different language backgrounds at home and at school, that is, bilingually instructed native signers, oralist-instructed native signers, and…

This experimental study investigated connections between subject expertise and multitasking ability among college students. One hundred thirty college students participated in the study. Participants were assessed on their subject expertise and reading tasks under three conditions: (a) reading only (silence condition), (b) reading with a video…

The present study investigated whether kindergarten teachers' causal attributions would predict children's reading-related task motivation and performance, or whether it is rather children's motivation and performance that contribute to teachers' causal attributions. To investigate this, 69 children (five to six years old at baseline) and their…

The study uses an orthographic judgment task to evaluate the efficiency of the lexical reading route in Italian dyslexic children. It has been suggested that Italian dyslexic children rely prevalently on the sub-word-level routine for reading. However, it is not easy to test the lexical reading route in Italian directly because of the lack of…

To explore the possible neural foundations of individual differences in intelligence test scores, we examined the associations between Raven's Matrices scores and two tasks that were administered in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) setting. The two tasks were an n-back working memory (N = 37) task and inspection time (N = 47). The…

Three experiments examined whether salient color singleton distractors automatically interfere with the detection singleton form targets in visual search (e.g., J. Theeuwes, 1992), or whether the degree of interference is top-down modulable. In Experiments 1 and 2, observers started with a pure block of trials, which contained either never a…

Historically, it was believed the perceptual mechanisms involved in individuating faces developed only very slowly over the course of childhood, and that adult levels of expertise were not reached until well into adolescence. Over the last 10 years, there has been some erosion of this view by demonstrations that all adult-like behavioural…