Publications by authors named "Jessica W Younger"
Article Synopsis
- Executive functions (EFs) are interconnected skills that impact academic success, yet they are frequently studied in isolation, making it hard to see how they work together.
- A study involving over 1200 students aged 7-15 utilized nine EF assessments to create cognitive profiles and analyzed their correlation with academic performance in reading and math.
- The findings highlighted that while students exhibited different EF profiles, these variations did not demonstrate a straightforward link between specific EFs and academic achievement, suggesting diverse cognitive pathways can lead to success.
Article Synopsis
- Musical instrument training is linked to better academic skills in kids, but access to this training is limited for some, creating disparities.
- A study investigated a digital rhythm game as an alternative to traditional instrument training, showing it could improve reading fluency in children, especially by enhancing their rhythmic timing.
- The findings suggest that while rhythm training benefits reading, it does not significantly affect math skills or other cognitive functions like attention or working memory.
Article Synopsis
- Executive functions (EFs) are crucial for positive outcomes in life, but understanding their development has been challenging due to methodological issues.
- A study was conducted with 1,286 middle childhood students (ages 8-14) using innovative adaptive assessments to measure key EFs: working memory, context monitoring, and interference resolution.
- Findings indicate that by age 10, EFs are organized into three stable components, but their refinement continues evolving until around age 14.
The present study tests two predictions stemming from the hypothesis that a source of difficulty with rational numbers is interference from whole number magnitude knowledge. First, inhibitory control should be an independent predictor of fraction understanding, even after controlling for working memory. Second, if the source of interference is whole number knowledge, then it should hinder fraction understanding.
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- * Research often takes place in controlled lab settings, which may not accurately reflect real-life school environments, and tends to focus narrowly on specific academic skills rather than broader academic success.
- * In a study of over 700 students aged 9-14, it was found that sustained attention positively correlated with both targeted academic assessments (like math fluency and reading comprehension) and broader measures (such as standardized test scores).
Relational thinking, the ability to represent abstract, generalizable relations, is a core component of reasoning and human cognition. Relational thinking contributes to fluid reasoning and academic achievement, particularly in the domain of math. However, due to the complex nature of many fluid reasoning tasks, it has been difficult to determine the degree to which relational thinking has a separable role from the cognitive processes collectively known as executive functions (EFs).
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- Cognitive impairment (CI) is common in multiple sclerosis (MS), but traditional assessments are lengthy, prompting the evaluation of a quicker tablet-based tool called Adaptive Cognitive Evaluation (ACE).
- A study with 53 MS participants and 24 non-MS participants demonstrated that ACE correlated well with standard cognitive tests, indicating its potential as an effective assessment method.
- Findings showed that those with CI in MS displayed slower reaction times and greater attention costs compared to both non-MS and non-CI MS groups, suggesting ACE could be a useful digital cognitive assessment for MS patients.
We describe functional and structural data acquired using a 3T scanner in a sample of 132 typically developing children, who were scanned when they were approximately 11 years old (i.e. Time 1).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to influence language skills, with children of lower SES backgrounds performing worse on language assessments compared to their higher SES peers. While there is abundant behavioral research on the effects of SES, whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms used to support language skill is less established. In this study, we examined the relation between maternal education (ME), a component of SES, and neural mechanisms of language.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroimaging work from developmental and reading intervention research has suggested a cause of reading failure may be lack of engagement of parietotemporal cortex during initial acquisition of grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) mappings. Parietotemporal activation increases following grapheme-phoneme learning and successful reading intervention. Further, stimulation of parietotemporal cortex improves reading skill in lower ability adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdults struggling with low reading skills are underserved by limited available treatments. While brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has the potential to improve a variety of cognitive functions, little work has been done examining its potential to treat reading disabilities. Research on the effects of tDCS on reading abilities has been somewhat inconsistent perhaps in part due to discrepancies between studies in the nature of the tasks.
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