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The proliferation of digital gadgets and increased media consumption among adolescents has raised interest and concern regarding possible effects on cognitive functioning. Research investigating this relationship has yielded mixed results. This study aims to replicate the research conducted by Baumgartner et al. concerning the relationship between adolescent media multitasking and executive functioning on a sample of 296 Romanian early adolescents. The same methodology as the original study was followed and its findings were partially replicated. Mainly, results of regression analyses indicated that more media multitasking with media activities was related to more self-reported executive difficulties, but not with performance on three computerized executive functioning tasks. Media multitasking with non-media activities was unrelated to executive functioning. When comparing extreme groups, however, heavier media multitasking was associated with faster performance on the task-shifting and inhibition computerized tasks. Implications for cognitive development and research methodology are discussed.

This study aimed to investigate the differential relationship between Temperament, Executive Functioning (EF) and Media Use Motivations and the frequency of two kinds of Media Multitasking (MM) in early adolescence. Results showed differential roles of temperamental Effortful Control, Negative Affectivity and Affiliativeness in predicting academic MM and MM with other media activities. Greater EF deficits in inhibition predicted more frequent MM with other media activities and fewer EF deficits in monitoring predicted more frequent academic MM. Significant relationships have also been found between some Media Use Motivations and MM. These results are discussed in the context of the changes in adolescents' relationship to technology that have been brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and persist after its end. Implications also center on the need to consider the context and factors that generated MM in the first place to better understand MM effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Romanian preschool settings, there is a tendency to use abstract strategies in language-learning activities. The present study explored if strategies based on an embodied cognition approach facilitate learning more than traditional strategies that progress from concrete to abstract. Twenty-five children between 4 and 5 years of age listened to a modified version of the "Town Musicians of Bremen" story. They were split into two groups: one interacted with the content while listening to the story and the other listened to the story and looked at pictures depicting the narrative sequence. Results show that children in the first group subsequently recognized more newly introduced words and idioms and performed better in retelling the narrative sequence in order. Implications are discussed with regard to both learning accounts in general and teaching strategies for language development in preschool settings in particular.

This opinion article raises the issue of conceptual crisis in psychology, i.e. the problem of having several meanings underlying many of the concepts we study. After exemplifying with the concepts of “flexibility” and “cognition”, I propose three avenues on the way to conceptual clarity, and stress the need for a stronger theoretical psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many theories that explain why humans display prosocial behaviors towards their fellows. Such prosocial behaviors manifest differently with respect to the culture where they occur. Over time, some prosocial behaviors have been formalized into volunteer work, which often happens in an association or a non-profit organization. In this qualitative research, we seek to grasp volunteering in its developmental phase, and present how volunteers, volunteers coordinators, and human resources experts conceptualize volunteering. We used a semi-structured interview guide to question 15 volunteers, 10 volunteers' coordinators, and 10 human resources experts. Findings indicate that volunteering is a learning opportunity, where people can develop their skills while helping others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of a talented music teacher and father of a prodigy, Leopold Mozart, it is natural to think about his influence on his son's life. Resisting the temptation to judge his behaviour specifically, in this essay I will discuss giftedness, the role of the environment in gifted children's high-level performance, and in particular the role of their parents. It is my hope that in the end we will have a more nuanced picture to refer to when trying to analyse Leopold's attitude toward his overwhelmingly talented son. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philosophia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cognitive flexibility is a hallmark of human cognition, but its development is still poorly understood. The present work examined the flexibility of categorization in preschool children. Thirty-three participants aged 3-4 years were divided into three groups, with each group receiving a different version of a flexible categorization task in which the targets belonged to two distinct categories. These versions manipulated the type of questions that were asked and the alternation of shape and color games. The children exhibited flexibility when the questions were specific (or asked about attributes). The results support the idea that instructions play a role in children's performance in sorting tasks. Considering cognitive flexibility as an expression of the interaction between children's knowledge and abilities on the one hand and the structure, specifics, or demands of the task on the other can help clarify what cognitive flexibility is and how it develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Psychologia-Paedagogia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Psychologia-Paedagogia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is a review of the literature about different types of gestures and the functions they serve across development, and about how gesture can bring evidence to support the embodied cognition approach. We will describe what aspects of children's thinking are revealed when they start using deictic, conventional and iconic gestures. We will discuss gesture's relation with language, symbol understanding, and learning. We will then present evidence for how gesture has been shown to facilitate the connection between action and thought, arguing that gesture reflects embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the influence of perceptual and attentional processes on conceptual development and another on the stage of research in the development of flexible categorization.

It is widely accepted nowadays that preschool children have much more sophisticated categorization abilities than previously thought. Although there is a vast literature on thematic and taxonomic categorization at this age, we still know little about whether and how children flexibly switch between these sources of information. The present paper gives an overview about what we know so far in this area. After reviewing some of the studies that investigate flexible object categorization in children, the article summarizes results about the factors that can influence the expression of this ability in preschoolers (e.g., instructions, type of task, and cognitive inhibition). In the end, we discuss the implications for research in cognitive development, as well as for education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this article is to offer a synthesis on school readiness, as it is understood today in fundamental research. In a moment in which early education is a very important issue in Romania, school readiness is a hot topic in international research. Looking at it from this perspective, all we would learn about school readiness from other educational systems can be informative for an optimal reconceptualization of our educational system. The article begins with a broad definition of school readiness and a description of the multiple levels of this concept. Afterwards, we try to understand when and how to assess school readiness, and outline the variations that exist between cultures, communities and individuals. The paper ends with recommendations for the reconceptualization of early education in the Romanian educational system, where the focus should be on child development and progress, and not on child assessment per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible categorization is highly influenced in preschool children by several external factors. The present study investigated instructions as important cues for orienting children's attention toward the relevant dimensions of a stimulus in a given context. The prediction was that more specific instructions (as in guided sorting) would lead to more flexible categorization than general instructions like "same as/goes with". 28 children (mean age - 3 years and 6 months) were distributed in two conditions: sorting with "matching" instructions and guided sorting. Results showed that indeed guided sorting led to more flexible categorizations at this age. This result underline the fact that the ability to take into account several dimensions for one stimulus in order to put it in different categories is influenced in the preschool years by the instructions children receive. This kind of studies could be relevant for the early investigation of cognitive flexibility, which represents one of the hallmarks of human thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aimed to investigate the relation between prefrontally-mediated attentional flexibility and anxiety levels in a non-clinical sample of preschool children. Anxiety was assessed using the Spence Preschool Anxiety Scale (Spence, Rapee, McDonald, & Ingram, 2001), while cognitive flexibility was measured using the Intra/Extradimensional Set Shift task (IED) from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB). Two separate studies were conducted, using two different versions of the IED task. In both studies, the samples were divided into a high-anxiety and a low-anxiety group based on each sample's median score on the scale. In the first study (N=78; age range: 3-6 years), we found a trend towards better performance (more stages completed) in the high-anxiety group. The tendency was statistically significant only in girls, while it was absent in boys. This pattern of performance was related to a tendency towards longer response latencies in girls with higher levels of anxiety. There was also a general tendency towards more extradimensional shifting errors than reversal errors. The second study (N=29; age range: 4-7 years) revealed only a performance trend towards fewer total errors in girls than boys. However, the rule reversal shift tended to have a significantly larger impact in high-anxiety boys, compared to either girls or low-anxiety boys. These results point to the relevance of investigating anxietyrelated cognitive performance in preschoolers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present exploratory study we investigate whether cognitive flexibility is a unitary mechanism underlying flexible behaviours across many domains or a domain-specific capacity. The literature on cognitive flexibility is divided into several research lines that do not converge. The most prominent one considers flexibility an executive function that represents the ability to switch among rules or tasks. In other research traditions it is associated with distinct components, such as the capacity to place an item into many categories (in creativity tests) or a characteristic of different cognitive or perceptual processes (e.g., flexible language use, flexibility in mathematics, perceptual flexibility). To determine whether flexibility in different domains relies on a general shared mechanism, 221 subjects from two countries (The United States and Romania, mean age 19.52 years) were tested online with several measurements from four different domains of investigation: language, mathematics, perception, and executive functions (specifically, set shifting). All tasks required some form of cognitive flexibility. In addition, we measured math anxiety to see how this relates to mathematical flexibility. The results show very few and small significant partial correlations among the tasks. They also highlight that there is no unitary overarching "executive" factor. The most prominent common factor was speed of processing for mathematical and language response times. Shifting does not seem to be a mechanism that underlies flexibility in all the investigated domains. While we acknowledge the need for replication of this study, the data suggest that the construct of shifting does not exhaust the notion of flexibility as it arises across cognitive domains., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s).)