Publications by authors named "Maria Carmen Usai"

Learning to read and write are essential academic skills that children develop during their early years of primary school. These skills are supported by various predictive indices that emerge in early childhood. This review has three main goals: to identify which factors are closely examined as predictors for reading and writing, specifically decoding and encoding skills, in different populations and languages (Objective 1); to assess the longitudinal relationship between these predictors and reading and writing skills (Objective 2), considering difficulties or disorders in these areas (Objective 3), during school-age.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: This study examines the impact of visual and auditory distractors on attention and inhibition in children with and without ADHD.

Method: The study used the MOXO d-CPT child version. The sample consisted of 208 children aged 8 to 12 years, including 64 with ADHD and 144 controls.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Executive Functions (EFs) are high-order cognitive processes relevant to learning and adaptation and frequently impaired in children with specific learning disorders (SLDs). This study aimed to investigate EFs in children with SLD and explore the role of specific EF-related subprocesses, such as stimuli processing and processing speed. Fifty-seven SLD and 114 typically developing (TD) children, matched for gender and age, completed four tasks measuring response inhibition, interference control, shifting, and updating on a web-based teleassessment platform.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Studies focusing on math abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are limited and often provide inconsistent results.

Aim: This meta-analysis was conducted to investigate math abilities in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) participants.

Methods And Procedures: According with PRISMA guidelines, a systematic search strategy was adopted.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The present explorative study aims to analyze the profiles of students seeking help in the two areas (emotion/relation or learning areas) of a psychological counseling service for students at the University of Genoa to better understand their request for support in pre- and post-pandemic periods. A total of 229 university students seeking for help from November 2018 to December 2021 completed a psychological battery investigating emotion regulation difficulties and pathological domains of personality (students taken in charge by the emotion/relation area) or motivation issues and anxiety and resilience levels (students taken in charge by the learning area). Regarding the emotion/relation area, results show that problems in emotion dysregulation, and especially in regulating positive emotions, are associated to several pathological domains of personality, such as Psychoticism, Antagonism, Disinhibition, Detachment, and Negative Affectivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The study investigates whether Italian verbal inflectional morphology is associated with inhibitory control skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory. A sample of Italian preschoolers aged 4;0 to 6;0 was assessed using a standardized inhibitory control task tapping two different inhibitory skills (response inhibition and interference suppression), and a morphological task requiring simple and complex inflections of verbs. The hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that working memory and the interference suppression scores were significantly associated with complex inflections but not with simple inflections of the verbs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This brief review examined the literature from 1990 to June 2020 on sex differences in inhibitory abilities from early childhood to adolescence, primarily in individuals with typical development (TD) and individuals with atypical development. The 38 articles included (28 on individuals with TD, eight on the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] population, and two on individuals with autism spectrum disorder [ASD]) suggest that the cognitive demand of the task is important, together with contextual factors that may interact with the development of inhibitory ability, for revealing differences between the sexes. The literature has neglected the multicomponential nature of inhibitory abilities, and the emphasis has consequently been placed on response inhibition (vs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This manuscript aimed to advance our understanding of inhibitory control (IC) in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), adopting a meta-analytic multilevel approach. The first meta-analysis, on 164 studies adopting direct measures, indicated a significant small-to-medium (g = 0.484) deficit in the group with ASD (n = 5140) compared with controls (n = 6075).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Only a few studies have investigated inhibitory sub-components in individuals with Down syndrome (DS). This study investigates interference suppression, through global-local processes, in 50 people with DS matched for mental age (MA) with 63 typically developing children (MA = 23.6 and 6.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Impulsivity/Reflexivity issue in inhibitory control ability has seldom been investigated in terms of individual differences in typically developing populations. Although there is evidence of changes in executive functioning (EF), including inhibition, in adolescence, very little is known about the role of individual differences. Using the data from 240 14-to-19-year-old high school students who completed a battery of EF tasks (Flanker, Go No-Go, Antisaccade, and Stop signal task), measures of emotion regulation strategies and behavioral difficulties, we performed a latent profile analysis to identify qualitatively distinct score profiles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

While previous research on inhibition in people with Down syndrome (DS) reported contradictory results, with no explicit theoretical model, on the other hand, a more homogeneous impaired profile on the delay of gratification skills emerged. The main goal of the present study was to investigate response inhibition, interference suppression, and delay of gratification in 51 individuals with DS matched for a measure of mental age (MA) with 71 typically developing (TD) children. Moreover, we cross-sectionally explored the strengths and weaknesses of these components in children and adolescents vs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Few studies have investigated inhibition in people with Down syndrome (DS), indicating contradictory results.

Aim: This meta-analysis investigated if people with DS show more severe difficulties on inhibition, compared to typically developing (TD) children matched on a measure of mental age (MA).

Methods And Procedures: Literature search included studies conducted before March 2019, combining the following keywords: "Down syndrome" with "Inhibition", "Interference control", "Effortful control", "Impulsivity", "Self-regulation", and "Executive functions".

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The present study investigates the latent organization of inhibitory control in children aged between 2;3 and 3;0 years. In addition, it explores the relationships between temperament dimensions - social orientation, motor activity, and attention -, inhibitory control and language. One-hundred-twelve typically developing children were evaluated with tasks for inhibitory control and lexical skills, while ratings of temperament and language were collected from their caregivers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Eating disorders (EDs) are associated with a reduced ability to regulate emotion and impulses during the life span. Working memory and executive functions (EFs) are cognitive regulatory systems supported by networks involving the pre-frontal cortex. Studies in EDs found impaired functioning in these domains, showing an association between EDs and the reduced ability to control emotions and impulses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In this study we examine the effectiveness and far transfer effects of a training that was found to be effective in promoting Executive Function (EF) in a sample of 5-year-old children (Traverso et al., 2015). By contrast with Traverso et al.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Visual memory in children with high-functioning autism (HFA) is an area of debate. According to the few studies that have examined visual memory in children with autism, the memory profile appears to vary according to the memory process and type of stimuli, and contrasting results may be found. This study aims to analyze the visual memory profile of children with HFA.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Adolescence is a fundamental transition phase, marked by physical, social, cognitive and emotional changes. At this stage in development two contrasting phenomena take place: brain changes cause a sensitivity to emotional aspects (Dahl, 2004); while also control processes register as well impressive improvements (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The present study aims to investigate inhibition in individuals with Down Syndrome compared to typically developing children with different inhibitory tasks tapping response inhibition and interference suppression. Previous studies that aimed to investigate inhibition in individuals with Down Syndrome reported contradictory results that are difficult to compare given the different types of inhibitory tasks used and the lack of reference to a theoretical model of inhibition that was tested in children (see Bunge et al., 2002; Gandolfi et al.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Executive function (EF) refers to a set of higher order cognitive processes that control and modulate cognition under continuously changing and multiple task demands. EF plays a central role in early childhood, is associated and predictive of important cognitive achievements and has been recognized as a significant aspect of school readiness. This study examines the efficacy of a group based intervention for 5-year-old children that focuses on basic components of EF (working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF