A Literature Review on the Effects of Exergames on Executive Function in Youth.

Exergames (video games that promote cognitive and physical activity simultaneously) benefit executive function in elderly populations. It has been suggested that exergames may induce larger effects than cognitive or exercise training alone, but few reviews have synthesized the causal factors of exergames on executive function from experimental research with youth. This review investigates (1) the various types of exergames and associated comparison conditions (2) the executive function outcome assessments commonly utilized in exergame research with youth (3) the efficacy of exergames by evaluating experimental studies that compared exergaming to cognitive, exercise, and passive control conditions inclusive of effect sizes and (4) the potential mechanisms underlying the changes in executive function induced from exergames.

Staying and Returning dynamics of young children's attention.

In this paper, we decompose selective sustained attending behavior into components of continuous attention maintenance and attentional transitions and study how each of these components develops in young children. Our results in two experiments suggest that changes in children's ability to return attention to a target locus after distraction ("Returning") play a crucial role in the development of selective sustained attention between the ages of 3.5-6 years, perhaps to a greater extent than changes in the ability to continuously maintain attention on the target ("Staying").

Effects of language background on executive function: Transfer across task and modality.

The relation between linguistic experience and cognitive function has been of great interest, but recent investigations of this question have produced widely disparate results, ranging from proposals for a "bilingual advantage," to a "bilingual disadvantage," to claims of no difference at all as a function of language. There are many possible sources for this lack of consensus, including the heterogeneity of bilingual populations, and the choice of different tasks and implementations across labs. We propose that another reason for this inconsistency is the task demands of transferring from linguistic experience to laboratory tasks can differ greatly as the task is modified.

Longitudinal investigation of executive function development employing task-based, teacher reports, and fNIRS multimethodology in 4- to 5-year-old children.

Increased focus on resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) and the use and accessibility of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have advanced knowledge on the interconnected nature of neural substrates underlying executive function (EF) development in adults and clinical populations. Less is known about the relationship between rsFC and developmental changes in EF during preschool years in typically developing children, a gap the present study addresses employing task-based assessment, teacher reports, and fNIRS multimethodology. This preregistered study contributes to our understanding of the neural basis of EF development longitudinally with 41 children ages 4-5.

A pre-registered, multi-lab non-replication of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE).

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.

Dual language statistical word segmentation in infancy: Simulating a language-mixing bilingual environment.

Infants are sensitive to syllable co-occurrence probabilities when segmenting words from fluent speech. However, segmenting two languages overlapping at the syllabic level is challenging because the statistical cues across the languages are incongruent. Successful segmentation, thus, relies on infants' ability to separate language inputs and track the statistics of each language.

A hidden Markov model for analyzing eye-tracking of moving objects : Case study in a sustained attention paradigm.

Eye-tracking provides an opportunity to generate and analyze high-density data relevant to understanding cognition. However, while events in the real world are often dynamic, eye-tracking paradigms are typically limited to assessing gaze toward static objects. In this study, we propose a generative framework, based on a hidden Markov model (HMM), for using eye-tracking data to analyze behavior in the context of multiple moving objects of interest.

Contingent responsivity in E-books modeled from quality adult-child interactions: Effects on children's learning and attention.

Experiences of contingent responsivity during shared book reading predict better learning outcomes. However, it is unclear whether contingent responsivity from a digital book could provide similar support for children. The effects on story recall and engagement interacting with a digital book that responded contingently on children's vocalizations (contingent book) were investigated, with a focus on the role of individual differences in attention.

Early developing syntactic knowledge influences sequential statistical learning in infancy.

Adults' linguistic background influences their sequential statistical learning of an artificial language characterized by conflicting forward-going and backward-going transitional probabilities. English-speaking adults favor backward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with the head-initial structure of English. Korean-speaking adults favor forward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with the head-final structure of Korean.

What's statistical about learning? Insights from modelling statistical learning as a set of memory processes.

Statistical learning has been studied in a variety of different tasks, including word segmentation, object identification, category learning, artificial grammar learning and serial reaction time tasks (e.g. Saffran et al.

Statistical learning and the critical period: how a continuous learning mechanism can give rise to discontinuous learning.

Infants and children are generally more successful than adults in learning novel languages, a phenomenon referred to as a critical or sensitive period for language acquisition. One explanation for this critical period is the idea that children have access to a set of language learning processes or mechanisms unavailable to adults. From this perspective, developmental change is explained in terms of a discontinuity of learning processes.

Endogenously and exogenously driven selective sustained attention: Contributions to learning in kindergarten children.

Selective sustained attention is vital for higher order cognition. Although endogenous and exogenous factors influence selective sustained attention, assessment of the degree to which these factors influence performance and learning is often challenging. We report findings from the Track-It task, a paradigm that aims to assess the contribution of endogenous and exogenous factors to selective sustained attention within the same task.

Impaired Statistical Learning in Developmental Dyslexia.

Purpose: Developmental dyslexia (DD) is commonly thought to arise from phonological impairments. However, an emerging perspective is that a more general procedural learning deficit, not specific to phonological processing, may underlie DD. The current study examined if individuals with DD are capable of extracting statistical regularities across sequences of passively experienced speech and nonspeech sounds.

Spectral information in nonspeech contexts influences children's categorization of ambiguous speech sounds.

For both adults and children, acoustic context plays an important role in speech perception. For adults, both speech and nonspeech acoustic contexts influence perception of subsequent speech items, consistent with the argument that effects of context are due to domain-general auditory processes. However, prior research examining the effects of context on children's speech perception have focused on speech contexts; nonspeech contexts have not been explored previously.

Discovering words in fluent speech: the contribution of two kinds of statistical information.

To efficiently segment fluent speech, infants must discover the predominant phonological form of words in the native language. In English, for example, content words typically begin with a stressed syllable. To discover this regularity, infants need to identify a set of words.

The extraction and integration framework: a two-process account of statistical learning.

The term statistical learning in infancy research originally referred to sensitivity to transitional probabilities. Subsequent research has demonstrated that statistical learning contributes to infant development in a wide array of domains. The range of statistical learning phenomena necessitates a broader view of the processes underlying statistical learning.

iMinerva: a mathematical model of distributional statistical learning.

Statistical learning refers to the ability to identify structure in the input based on its statistical properties. For many linguistic structures, the relevant statistical features are distributional: They are related to the frequency and variability of exemplars in the input. These distributional regularities have been suggested to play a role in many different aspects of language learning, including phonetic categories, using phonemic distinctions in word learning, and discovering non-adjacent relations.

When variability matters more than meaning: the effect of lexical forms on use of phonemic contrasts.

During the first half of the 2nd year of life, infants struggle to use phonemic distinctions in label-object association tasks. Prior experiments have demonstrated that exposure to the phonemes in distinct lexical forms (e.g.

Effects of visual information on adults' and infants' auditory statistical learning.

Infant and adult learners are able to identify word boundaries in fluent speech using statistical information. Similarly, learners are able to use statistical information to identify word-object associations. Successful language learning requires both feats.

Domain general constraints on statistical learning.

All theories of language development suggest that learning is constrained. However, theories differ on whether these constraints arise from language-specific processes or have domain-general origins such as the characteristics of human perception and information processing. The current experiments explored constraints on statistical learning of patterns, such as the phonotactic patterns of an infants' native language.

Dogs, bogs, labs, and lads: what phonemic generalizations indicate about the nature of children's early word-form representations.

Whereas young children accept words that differ by only a single phoneme as equivalent labels for novel objects, older children do not (J. F. Werker, C.

How the melody facilitates the message and vice versa in infant learning and memory.

Infants are often presented with input in which there are multiple related regularities, as is the case in musical input with both melodic and lyrical structure. Adult learners often learn more easily from complex input containing multiple correlated regularities than from simplified input. Do infants also capitalize on complexity, or instead do they benefit from simplified input? In this series of experiments, infants were presented with music in which melodic and lyrical structure predicted each other, or in which only one type of regularity was presented in isolation (melodies alone, or lyrics presented with no melody).

Infant-Directed Speech Facilitates Word Segmentation.

There are reasons to believe that infant-directed (ID) speech may make language acquisition easier for infants. However, the effects of ID speech on infants' learning remain poorly understood. The experiments reported here assess whether ID speech facilitates word segmentation from fluent speech.

Spectral tilt as a cue to word segmentation in infancy and adulthood.

Across a variety of tasks, adults respond differently to syllables with multiple stress cues than to syllables with only one cue to stress. This series of experiments was designed to explore how infants and adults use partial stress as a cue to word boundaries. In the first experiment, 9-month-old infants treated syllables with only one cue to stress (spectral tilt) as a strong cue to word boundaries.