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Responding to a prospective memory task in the course of an ongoing activity requires switching tasks, which typically comes at a cost in performing the ongoing activity. Similarly, when the prospective memory task is deactivated, a cost can occur when previously relevant prospective memory targets appear in the course of the ongoing activity. In three experiments with undergraduate student participants (N = 226), in which cue focality was manipulated as a function of processing overlaps, we investigated the after-effects of activated and deactivated prospective memory target events. We predicted that lower focality results in stronger after-effects when the prospective memory task is activated but to weaker after-effects when the prospective memory task is deactivated. In contrast, we predicted that higher focality results in weaker after-effects when the prospective memory task is activated but to stronger after-effects when the prospective memory task is deactivated. For activated prospective memory, the pattern of results conformed to the expectations. For deactivated prospective memory, after-effects occurred only under high process overlap situations in a zero-target condition, in which participants were instructed for the prospective memory task, but never had the opportunity to perform it, indicating the special representational status of uncompleted intentions. We discuss these findings within the process overlap framework, which allows more fine-grained distinctions than the focal versus non-focal dichotomy.

According to Munsat (1965, The concept of memory. University of Michigan), a person who makes frequent prospective memory (PM) errors is considered as having a flawed character rather than a bad memory. Given that PM completes its development only in young adulthood, this bias might occur not only within social relationships but also in school. However, little is known about the impact of this bias on academic performance.This study aimed to evaluate the impact of children's PM on teacher's evaluations of their academic performance (i.e., grades) and social skills.A total of 158 eight- and twelve-year-old children (48% females) participated in this study.A working memory (WM) updating task was used as ongoing task (OT), in which the PM task was embedded and required participants to respond whenever certain pictures appeared. Children's social skills were measured through teacher ratings, whereas grades were collected as indicators of teachers' assessment of academic performance. Children's WM span and inhibitory control were also assessed.Results showed that 8- and 12-year-old children's academic performance was predicted by both PM performance and teachers' evaluations of social skills. However, social skills evaluations were not predicted by PM performance. WM span was related to grades in 8 year olds, while inhibitory control was related to PM performance in 12 year olds.These outcomes highlight that children's grades are not explained only by academic performance itself but also by other personal skills. Awareness of the biases which can occur when evaluating children's academic performance can help teachers to be more objective in their assessment.

This study investigated developmental differences in metacognitive monitoring and control in younger (5- to 6-year-old) and older (8- to 10-year-old) children’s prospective memory (PM). Metacogniti...

The present study was aimed to investigate English learning as second language, in school, in first, second and third graders of twelve classes randomly assigned to a control or an experimental group. Children in the latter are exposed during English school teaching to the method “An English Island®” and to its platform activities. The method “An English Island®” offers a variety of strategies for teaching English in primary school, an innovative digital tool that promotes teaching/learning English language’s communicative approach, lead students to become familiar with the language in a sort of continuous, inclusive workout, in which everyone participates and talks.English skills as well as cognitive abilities are tested in both groups at the beginning and at the end of the school year with the aim to compare control and experimental classes in both a longitudinal and a cross-sectional design.

The research fields of cognitive neuroscience and education are often criticized because of the gap that separates them. In the past 20 years, many actions have been taken to bridge this gap; advantages and criticisms of these efforts have been observed. Only some changes could be documented, and they were not sufficiently commensurate with the efforts. To overcome these limitations, a different metaphor is outlined, consisting of a common field that should be cultivated by scholars operating from both perspectives. The new metaphor moves the perspective from “what is missing” (the bridge) to an existing field that requires concrete actions to be taken. The proposal details which topics from the two disciplines should be considered relevant when cultivating the common field. Then, based on the metaphor of the common field, real-life suggestions about how to develop these competencies are proposed, and recommendations for further actions are provided based on sustainability principles. The utilization of school psychologists (namely, their transition to educational scientists) and the introduction of optional stages and in-tandems involving cooperation between existing university courses in education and neuroscience are seen as feasible interventions. This change in vision is expected to drive further actions toward more effective cooperation between cognitive neuroscience and education.

Prospective memory (PM) undergoes important developmental changes during the primary school years, particularly around 7 and 8 years of age. Recent studies have suggested that, as well as executive functions (EFs), PM development also benefits from age-related increments in metamemory (MM) abilities. The primary aim of the current study was to explore the role of MM monitoring and control processes (i.e., procedural MM) of 7- and 8-year-old children in a PM task including specific cues. Monitoring processes were assessed by asking children to judge their own PM performance before (predictions) and after (postdictions) in performing a PM task. In addition, children were asked to report the strategy they used to remember the PM task. Reactive effects of making predictions and using strategies were assessed via both an ongoing task (OT) and PM performance. EF and declarative MM performance was also examined. Results showed that children who were asked to predict PM performance had faster PM response times (RTs), but not higher accuracy rates, than children in a control group. However, strategy use affected both PM and OT performance, with those children reporting active strategy use obtaining higher PM accuracy rates and slower OT RTs. Finally, switching abilities were also predictive of OT performance. This investigation highlights the importance of studying MM monitoring and control processes in relation to children’s PM.

Recently, event-based prospective memory (PM) performance of children has been shown to benefit from different encoding strategies such as imagining the execution of a future PM task (i.e., future thinking) and making performance predictions (i.e., metacognitive monitoring). This study aimed to investigate whether and how these two encoding strategies affect PM performance alone and in combination. For this purpose, 127 children aged 8-11 years were assigned to four encoding conditions: (a) standard, (b) performance predictions, (c) future thinking, and (d) future thinking + performance predictions. The ongoing task performance costs (i.e., attentional monitoring), working memory (WM) span, and metacognitive monitoring judgments, such as task difficulty expectations, performance postdictions, confidence judgments, and strategy use, were also evaluated among participants. The results show that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions considerably improved children's PM performance without incurring additional attentional monitoring costs. Moreover, whereas children generally tended to overestimate their PM performance, more realistic lower-performance predictions were related to higher PM scores for children in the combined condition. Finally, age, WM, and strategy use significantly predicted PM performance independent of the encoding condition. This study is the first to demonstrate that combining future thinking instructions with performance predictions enhances children's PM performance compared with each encoding strategy alone. Moreover, this work is the first to show that by simply imagining the execution of a PM task, children's prediction accuracy can be improved, which is significantly related to the PM performance advantage.

Prospective memory (PM) develops considerably during the primary school years (7 or 8years of age). Developmental changes have been mainly related to executive functions, although it has been recently suggested that PM would also potentially benefit from metamemory (MM). To date, only procedural MM, operationalized as performance predictions, has been investigated in relation to PM, whereas declarative MM has remained unexplored. Adults' performance has been shown to improve with predictions, but only in a resource-demanding (i.e., categorical) PM task rather than a more automatic (i.e., specific) one. The aim of the current investigation was to study whether PM performance of 7-year-old children (N=59) would benefit from performance predictions. Thus, half of the children predicted their performance and half of them received standard instructions for two PM tasks: one including categorical PM targets and one including specific ones. To investigate the processes underlying the retrieval of PM targets and the effect of predictions, we obtained measures for declarative MM, inhibitory control, and working memory (WM). Results revealed that children benefitted from performance predictions in the categorical PM task but not in the specific one. This advantage caused slower ongoing task response times, suggesting that strategic monitoring processes were enhanced. Moreover, PM performance was related to WM capacity and declarative MM. However, declarative MM mainly predicted PM advantage in the prediction group, showing that children with high MM knowledge benefitted especially from performance predictions. These findings are the first showing the important relation among procedural MM, declarative MM, and PM in school-aged children.

Nowadays Virtual Reality (VR) is an extremely versatile technology capable to cope with many areas of human life, and its fast development requires constant evaluation and validation. Cognitive models of human behavior play a central role in this evaluation, aiming at obtaining high quality, safe and usable products. A problem currently faced by VR users inside immersive Virtual Environments (iVEs) consists in the Simulator-induced Sickness (SS), a particular kind of motion sickness evoked by the simulated visual motion. SS can reduce subjects’ performances, and bias data collected with VR. Although Tracking Systems (TS) were thought to reduce SS symptoms, their effective contribution is not clear. A task based on the Traveling Salaperson was implemented in an iVE to investigate whether TS (a) evoked less SS symptoms and (b) facilitated performance in participants with respect to a control condition without TS. Results showed that TS allowed reduction of many SS symptoms, but this did not produced clear benefits on the cognitive performance, mainly true for female subjects. While TSs may facilitate enjoyment of iVE reducing SS, the higher susceptibility of females suggested that VR designers and producers should consider valuable a certain training before using the iVEs.

In the present study, we examined the effects of bilingualism and age on a color–shape binding task (assessing visual working memory) and a global–local task (assessing inhibitory processes) in a sample of 55 bilingual and 49 monolingual children 8 and 10 years old. In the color–shape binding task, corrected recognition scores increased in older children; bilingual children performed better than monolinguals in the shape-only condition, but the two groups were equally accurate in the color-only and combination conditions. In the global–local task, accuracy was higher in bilingual than in monolingual children, particularly on incongruent trials; monolingual children showed a strong global precedence effect (higher accuracy in the global than in the local conditions and greater global-to-local interference), whereas bilingual children exhibited a small, but significant, local precedence effect (higher accuracy in the local than in the global conditions and greater local-to-global interference). These findings confirm and extend previous evidence indicating that the bilingualism advantage is more pronounced in working memory tasks involving inhibitory processes.