The Associations Between Child-Care Services During the Preschool Years and High School Graduation: A 20-Year Longitudinal Population-Based Study.

Objective: Together with family factors, early care and education (ECE) services were shown to improve school readiness in kindergarten. However, it is not clear whether better school readiness at age 6 years translates into higher rates of high school graduation years later. Our objective was therefore to investigate the long-term associations between the use of ECE and high school graduation while considering the sex of the child and the socioeconomic status of the parents as moderators.

Early childhood child care and disruptive behavior problems during adolescence: a 17-year population-based propensity score study.

Background: Child-care services during early childhood provide opportunities for social interactions that may facilitate children's learning of acceptable social behaviors. Furthermore, they may reduce exposure to family adversity for some children. The aim of this study was to determine whether intensity of exposure to child-care services prior to age 5 years has a beneficial effect on disruptive behavior problems during adolescence, and whether the effect is more pronounced for children from low socioeconomic families.

Testing between the gunpowder fuse and the filling-hose analogy for mental curve tracing using electroencephalography: boom!

Curve tracing occurs when a line is followed covertly to accomplish a task, for example, to determine whether two landmarks are on the same line or not (could Highway 61 take Robert Johnson from New Orleans to St Louis?). Previous work suggests that attention either moves along the curve, momentarily activating local representations of the curve during this process, leaving little or no trace of this activation once attention has passed, or attention spreads along the curve, resulting in an activated state along the entire portion of the curve that was traced. We re-examined this issue using event-related potentials.

Backward masking interrupts spatial attention, slows downstream processing, and limits conscious perception.

The attentional blink (AB) is a difficulty in correctly processing a target when it follows one or more other targets after a short delay. When no backward mask is presented after the last critical target, there is no or little behavioral AB deficit. The mask plays an important role in limiting conscious access to target information.

Enhanced frontal activation underlies sparing from the attentional blink: Evidence from human electrophysiology.

Using the ERP method, we examined the processing operations elicited by stimuli that appear within the same temporal attention window. Forty subjects searched for letter targets among digit distractors displayed in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). ERPs were examined under conditions where a single target was embedded among distractors and compared to those recorded when two consecutive targets were embedded among distractors.