One of the most enduring images from Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" (2012) is the campfire, the place of warmth and community around which gathered early humankind. It seems an ideal metaphor for teaching and learning, with mentors and learners gathered around an enterprise of mutual society: No one at the core, but all warmed and…

Students with learning disabilities (LDs) often need additional supports and structure in inquiry classrooms. The authors describe three ways teachers can enhance the achievement of these students: (1) focusing on big ideas; (2) using graphic organizers; and (3) providing mnemonic strategies. Struggling students with LD will benefit greatly from…

Background: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between brain tumour location and core areas of cognitive and behavioural functioning for paediatric brain tumour survivors. The extant literature both supports and refutes an association between paediatric brain tumour location and neurocognitive outcomes. We examined…

A growing interest exists in the measuring of social adaptive functioning in children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities (MBID), but valid instruments to measure this construct are lacking. The aim of the present study was to develop such an instrument and to examine it on its discriminate validity. In 141 children aged 8-12 years a…

This study examined the impact of a working memory (WM) training programme on measures of WM, IQ, behavioural inhibition, self-report test and trait anxiety and teacher reported emotional and behavioural difficulties and attentional control before and after WM training and at a 3 month follow-up. The WM training group (N = 7) showed significantly…

This article reviews research on working memory (WM) and its use in second language (L2) acquisition research. Recent developments in the model and issues surrounding the operationalization of the construct itself are presented, followed by a discussion of various methods of measuring WM. These methods include word and digit span tasks, reading,…

The disruption of short-term memory by to-be-ignored auditory sequences (the changing-state effect) has often been characterized as attentional capture by deviant events (deviation effect). However, the present study demonstrates that changing-state and deviation effects are functionally distinct forms of auditory distraction: The disruption of…

Mnemonic deficits in patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage arising from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) are traditionally constrained to long-term episodic memory, sparing short-term and working memory (WM). This view of WM as being independent of MTL structures has recently been challenged by a small number of patient and neuroimaging…

Child development is accompanied by a robust increase in immediate memory. This may be due to either an increase in the number of items (chunks) that can be maintained in working memory or an increase in the size of those chunks. We tested these hypotheses by presenting younger and older children (7 and 12 years of age) and adults with different…

When tracking moving objects in space humans usually attend to the objects' spatial locations and update this information over time. To what extent do surface features assist attentive tracking? In this study we asked participants to track identical or uniquely colored objects. Tracking was enhanced when objects were unique in color. The benefit…

New chemistry materials were devised for pre university National Certificate (NC) nursing students studying chemistry at a further education college. Previously, preliminary work showed that students felt that the chemistry taught to them was irrelevant, boring and difficult. It was hoped that through an applications-led style curriculum…

The inner voice- we all know what it is because we all have it and use it when we are thinking or reading, for example. Little work has been done on it in our field, with the notable exception of Brian Tomlinson, but presumably it must be a cognitive phenomenon which is of great importance in thinking, language learning, and reading in a foreign…

Mammillary body atrophy is present in a number of neurological conditions and recent clinical findings highlight the importance of these nuclei for memory. While most accounts of diencephalic amnesia emphasize the functional importance of the hippocampal projections to the mammillary bodies, the present study tested the importance of the other…

An eye-movement monitoring experiment investigated readers' response to temporarily ambiguous sentences. The sentences were ambiguous because a relative clause could attach to one of two preceding nouns. Semantic information disambiguated the sentences. Working memory considerations predict an overall preference for the second of the two nouns, as…

Any instructional theory that ignores the limits of working memory when dealing with novel information or ignores the disappearance of these limits when dealing with familiar information in unlikely to be effective. (Kirschner et al. 2006, 77) (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)