Executive functioning (EF) has been shown to relate to academic achievement and well-being. Independent bodies of work have aimed to understand what environmental or personal attributes influence EF ability. However, most research has not considered how constellations of risk factors create distinct patterns of influence on EF ability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExecutive function (EF) abilities have been linked to numerous important life outcomes. We longitudinally characterized EF and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) trajectories across adolescence (initial ages 8-19). Utilizing 3 years of annual data in 99 youth collected between years 2016 and 2020 (70.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExecutive function (EF) and social function are both critical skills that continue to develop through adolescence and are strongly predictive of many important life outcomes. Longstanding empirical and theoretical work has suggested that EF shapes social function. However, there is little empirical work on this topic in adolescence, despite both EF and social function continuing to mature into early adulthood (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic presented a series of stressors that could relate to psychological difficulties in children and adolescents. Executive functioning (EF) supports goal achievement and is associated with life success, and better outcomes following early life adversity. EF is also strongly related to processing speed, another predictor of life outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study aimed to examine changes in depression and anxiety symptoms from before to during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of 1,339 adolescents (9-18 years old, 59% female) from three countries. We also examined if age, race/ethnicity, disease burden, or strictness of government restrictions moderated change in symptoms. Data from 12 longitudinal studies (10 U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVerbs are central to the syntactic structure of sentences, and, thus, important for learning one's native language. This study examined how children visually inspect events as they hear, and do not hear, a new verb. Specifically, there is evidence that children may focus on the agent of the action or may prioritize attention to the action being performed; to date, little evidence is available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiol Psychiatry Glob Open Sci
December 2021
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives in numerous ways. How youth have been impacted by the pandemic and which preexisting factors best relate to COVID-19 responses are of high importance for effective identification and treatment of those most vulnerable. Youth with pre-pandemic mental health difficulties such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be at risk for worse well-being during and after the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-derivation of novel facts through integration of memory content is fundamental to acquiring new knowledge and a means of building a semantic knowledge base. It involves combining memory content acquired across separate episodes of learning to generate new knowledge that was not explicitly taught in either episode. To self-derive, one needs to reactivate earlier learned memory content upon exposure to related content and then integrate the learning episodes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow separate yet related episodes of experience are associated in memory is a major question in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. Adults and children both integrate content acquired in separate episodes, yet they may do so under different task conditions. Neuroimaging studies suggest that adults integrate the contents of separate memory traces at encoding and thus without an explicit prompt; behavioral studies suggest that children do so only when specifically prompted.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren learning a verb may benefit from hearing it across situations (e.g., Behrend, 1995; Childers, 2011; Fisher et al, 1994; Pinker, 1989).
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