Exploring the relationship between early cognitive ability and age-60 sleep quality: The Newcastle Thousand Families Study birth cohort.

Objectives: Poor sleep quality has been linked to adverse health outcomes. It is important to understand factors contributing to sleep quality. Previous research has suggested increased cognition and education duration have a protective effect on sleep quality in old age.

A mixed-method exploration of mental toughness, perceived stress and quality of life in mental health workers.

WHAT IS KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT?: Staff working with other people's mental health are in more danger of experiencing high stress at work. These members of staff are more likely to have mental health problems themselves. Previous research has suggested that training these members of staff to deal with their daily stress and become mentally tougher can protect them.

Are forward and backward recall the same? A dual-task study of digit recall.

There is some debate surrounding the cognitive resources underlying backward digit recall. Some researchers consider it to differ from forward digit recall due to the involvement of executive control, while others suggest that backward recall involves visuospatial resources. Five experiments therefore investigated the role of executive-attentional and visuospatial resources in both forward and backward digit recall.

Scoring methods and the predictive ability of working memory tasks.

Measures of working memory (WM) are useful predictors of cognitive skills and educational attainment in children. A number of scoring methods can be used for WM tasks-for example, the sum of all correctly recalled stimuli in perfectly recalled lists (absolute score) or the proportion of items recalled in the correct serial position during the task (proportion correct). The present study explored whether proportion correct scoring had an advantage over absolute scoring of WM tasks for predicting children's educational attainment.

The effects of cognitive demand upon relationships between working memory and cognitive skills.

The present study explored the effects of cognitive demand upon relationships between working memory and cognitive skills. Both children and adults were tested on a measure of short-term memory and three measures of counting span, which varied in cognitive demand. When statistically controlling for short-term memory and the speed of counting operations, the more demanding the counting-span task, the closer its relationship with cognitive skills.

Executive functions and achievements in school: Shifting, updating, inhibition, and working memory.

Links have recently been established between measures of educational attainment and both verbal and visuo-spatial aspects of working memory. Relationships have also been identified between specific executive functions-shifting, updating, and inhibition-and scholastic achievement. In the present study, scholastic attainment, shifting, updating, inhibition, and verbal and visuo-spatial working memory were assessed in 11- and 12-year-old children.