The Long and Winding Road to Real-Life Experiments: Remote Assessment of Executive Functions with Computerized Games-Results from 8 Years of Naturalistic Interventions.

Mate Marote is an open-access cognitive training software aimed at children between 4 and 8 years old. It consists of a set of computerized games specifically tailored to train and evaluate Executive Functions (EF), a class of processes critical for purposeful, goal-directed behavior, including working memory, planning, flexibility, and inhibitory control. Since 2008, several studies were performed with this software at children's own schools in interventions supervised in-person by cognitive scientists.

Differential psychophysiological responses associated with decision-making in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

This study examined how socioeconomic status (SES) influences on decision-making processing. The roles of anticipatory/outcome-related cardiac activity and awareness of task contingencies were also assessed. One hundred twelve children (M = 5.

Visuospatial attention revamps cortical processing of sound amid audiovisual uncertainty.

Selective attentional biases arising from one sensory modality manifest in others. The effects of visuospatial attention, important in visual object perception, are unclear in the auditory domain during audiovisual (AV) scene processing. We investigate temporal and spatial factors that underlie such transfer neurally.

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of different processes during a target identification task assessing perceptual learning.

This study aimed to test whether a target identification task involving same and different judgments to assess the ability to differentiate between similar pre-exposed stimuli-i.e., perceptual learning-could actually be assessing two different cognitive processes.

Educational Robotics Intervention to Foster Computational Thinking in Preschoolers: Effects of Children's Task Engagement.

Computational thinking (CT) is a broadly used term in education to refer to the cognitive processes underlying the application of computer science concepts and strategies of problem-solving. Recent literature has pointed out the value of children acquiring computational thinking skills (i.e.

Socioeconomic status differences in children's affective decision-making: The role of awareness in the Children's Gambling Task.

Future-oriented decision-making is an important adaptive behavior. In the present study, we examined whether decision-making varies as a function of socioeconomic status (SES) using the Children's Gambling task (CGT). We administered the CGT to 227 children (49% female, 48% low SES) between the ages of 5 and 7 years.

Partial agreement between task and BRIEF-P-based EF measures depends on school socioeconomic status.

Executive functions (EF), either conceptualized as skills involved in regulation of cognition and emotion in service of goal-oriented behavior, or reductively as working memory, flexibility and inhibitory control, are commonly invoked constructs in developmental science. Two main traditions on EFs measurement prevail, one consisting of ratings obtained through questionnaires that inquire on behavior in common situations, the other based on performance in laboratory tasks. Whether both types of assessment actually refer to the same constructs is not consensual.

Teaching the Science in Neuroscience to Protect From Neuromyths: From Courses to Fieldwork.

In recent decades, Cognitive Neuroscience has evolved from a rather arcane field trying to understand how the brain supports mental activities, to one that contributes to public policies. In this article, we focus on the contributions from Cognitive Neuroscience to Education. This line of research has produced a great deal of information that can potentially help in the transformation of Education, promoting interventions that help in several domains including literacy and math learning, social skills and science.

The influence of affective state on exogenous attention to emotional distractors: behavioral and electrophysiological correlates.

The interplay between exogenous attention to emotional distractors and the baseline affective state has not been well established yet. The present study aimed to explore this issue through behavioral measures and event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants (N = 30) completed a digit categorization task depicted over negative, positive or neutral distractor background pictures, while they experienced negative, positive and neutral affective states elicited by movie scenes.

Exogenous attention to facial vs non-facial emotional visual stimuli.

The capacity of the two types of non-symbolic emotional stimuli most widely used in research on affective processes, faces and (non-facial) emotional scenes, to capture exogenous attention, was compared. Negative, positive and neutral faces and affective scenes were presented as distracters to 34 participants while they carried out a demanding digit categorization task. Behavioral (reaction times and number of errors) and electrophysiological (event-related potentials-ERPs) indices of exogenous attention were analyzed.