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Abstract Mobile devices are ubiquitous, but their potential for adaptive educational interventions remains largely untapped. We identify three key promises of mobile interventions for educational research and practice: 1) intervening when it is most beneficial (i.e., “just-in-time adaptivity”), 2) estimating causal effects of interventions in ecologically valid settings, 3) considering the impact of context on the effectiveness of interventions. We discuss the challenges and next steps to advance this field.

It has been debated whether working memory (WM) performance is modulated by the valence of the stimuli that are being processed. A recent meta-analysis revealed that at the behavioral level and in individuals without mental health problems, mean-level performance differences in WM tasks with neutral versus affective conditions are small to negligible. We took this finding an important step further by employing a psychometric approach. This is an important refinement of previous work because even in the absence of mean-level differences, differential processing of affective versus nonaffective information may still be occurring. We examined whether at the construct level, 2 latent WM factors could be distinguished in capturing the processing of neutral and affective stimuli, respectively. Applying confirmatory factor analyses (N = 183 university students) to a battery of 18 tasks (3 n-back paradigms crossed with 3 stimulus types and neutral vs. affective valence), the 2 factors correlated perfectly. This result was replicated when neutral stimuli were analyzed together with either positive or negative stimuli. Based on individual differences, the processing of affective versus nonaffective stimuli in WM therefore cannot be distinguished, at least not in a student sample of younger adults.

Properties of psychological variables at the mean or variance level can differ between persons and within persons across multiple time points. For example, cross-sectional findings between persons of different ages do not necessarily reflect the development of a single person over time. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the difference between covariance structures, expressed by covariance matrices, that evolve between persons and within a single person over multiple time points. If these structures are identical at the population level, the structure is called ergodic. However, recent data confirms that ergodicity is not generally given, particularly not for cognitive variables. For example, the "g" factor that is dominant for cognitive abilities between persons seems to explain far less variance when concentrating on a single person's data. However, other subdimensions of cognitive abilities seem to appear both between and within persons; that is, there seems to be a lower-dimensional subspace of cognitive abilities in which cognitive abilities are in fact ergodic. In this article, we present ergodic subspace analysis (ESA), a mathematical method to identify, for a given set of variables, which subspace is most important within persons, which is most important between person, and which is ergodic. Similar to the common spatial patterns method, the ESA method first whitens a joint distribution from both the between and the within variance structure and then performs a principle component analysis (PCA) on the between distribution, which then automatically acts as an inverse PCA on the within distribution. The difference of the eigenvalues allows a separation of the rotated dimensions into the three subspaces corresponding to within, between, and ergodic substructures. We apply the method to simulated data and to data from the COGITO study to exemplify its usage.

Self-regulation was found to be positively associated with school performance. Interrelations between self-regulation, working memory (WM), and achievement goals, in particular mastery goals, have been established, as well as associations with academic outcomes. It stands to reason that self-regulation, WM, achievement goals, and academic success are related on a daily level. However, previous research rarely considered this level of analysis. Here, we therefore addressed the relations of daily self-regulation, WM, and achievement goals, and their relevance for daily and general academic success. Data were obtained through ambulatory assessments in 90 students before (Study 1; M[subscript age] = 9.83, SD[subscript age] = 0.50) and 108 students after their transition to secondary school (Study 2; M[subscript age] = 10.12, SD[subscript age] = 0.45) across 20 school days. Students reported about daily achievement goals prior to school, self-regulation at school, and perceived academic success after school, as well as report card grades. Daily WM was assessed at school. Study 1 showed positive associations between daily mastery goals and self-regulation, but not with WM. Together, daily performance-approach goals and self-regulation, but not other goals or WM uniquely contributed to daily perceived academic success. Study 2 showed positive associations between daily mastery goals and self-regulation, but not with WM. Average daily mastery goals predicted daily WM. Together, daily mastery goals and self-regulation, but not WM, uniquely contributed to daily perceived academic success. In both studies, average levels of WM, but not achievement goals or self-regulation predicted report card grades. Results thus corroborate theoretical considerations on the importance of distinguishing self-regulation processes at between- and within-person levels.

Cognitive performance is both heritable and sensitive to environmental inputs and sustained practice over time. However, it is currently unclear how genetic effects on cognitive performance change over the course of learning. We examine how polygenic scores (PGS) created from genome-wide association studies of educational attainment and cognitive performance are related to improvements in performance across nine cognitive tests (measuring perceptual speed, working memory, and episodic memory) administered to 131 adults (N = 51, ages = 20-31, and N = 80, ages = 65-80 years) repeatedly across 100 days. We observe that PGS associations with performance on a given task can change over the course of learning, with the specific pattern of change in associations differing across tasks. PGS correlations with pre-test to post-test scores may mask variability in how soon learning occurs over the course of practice. The associations between PGS and learning do not appear to simply reconstitute patterns of association between baseline performance and subsequent learning. Associations involving PGSs, however, were small with large confidence intervals. Intensive longitudinal research such as that described here may be of substantial value for clarifying the genetics of learning when implemented as far larger scale.

Pattern separation (PS) describes the process by which the brain discriminates similar stimuli from previously encoded stimuli. This fundamental process requires the intact processing by specific subfields in the hippocampus and can be examined using mnemonic discrimination tasks. Previous studies reported different patterns for younger and older individuals between mnemonic discrimination performance and hippocampal subfield activation. Here, we investigated the relationship between the lure discrimination index (LDI) and hippocampal subfield volume and activity across the adult lifespan (20-70 years old). Using ultra-high field functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging at 7 T, we found that lower DG volume and higher CA3 activation was associated with worse LDI performance in individuals (>60 years), suggesting that this higher activation may be an indication of aberrant neurodegenerative-related processes. In fact, higher activation in the CA1 and DG was associated with lower volumes in these subfields. For individuals around 40-50 years old, we observed that greater left and right DG volume, and greater activity in the CA3 was associated with lower LDI performance. Taken together, these results suggest that the relationship between memory and hippocampal subfield structure or function varies nonlinearly and possibly reciprocally with age, with midlife being a critically vulnerable period in life.

To slow down the spread of the COVID-19 virus, schools around the world were closed in early 2020, transferring children's scholastic activities to the homes and imposing a massive burden on parents and school-age children. Using data of a 21-day diary study conducted between March and April 2020 in Germany, this work examined whether (a) distance learning and (b) parents' involvement therein were associated with negative parent--child interactions and affective well-being of parents and children, over and above the effect of daily stressors. Participants were 562 parents (489 mothers, M[subscript age] = 42.79, SD[subscript age] = 6.12, range = 25-63) most of whom were married (n = 382, 68.0%). They responded to the daily items with respect to the youngest child living in their household (M[subscript age] = 9.74, SD[subscript age] = 2.81, range = 6-19). On days when children were working on school tasks, parents reported more negative parent-child interactions as well as lower parental and child positive affect and higher child negative affect, but not higher parental negative affect. Moreover, days when parents were more heavily involved in learning (i.e., when children worked less independently) were days with more negative parent-child interactions, lower parental and child positive affect, and higher parental and child negative affect. Negative parent-child interactions were linked to lower affective well-being of parents and children, and partially accounted for the relation among daily stressors and affective well-being. The present work highlights the need for measures to better support school-age children and their parents during distance learning.

Personalized education--the systematic adaptation of instruction to individual learners--has been a long-striven goal. We review research on personalized education that has been conducted in the laboratory, in the classroom, and in digital learning environments. Across all learning environments, we find that personalization is most successful when relevant learner characteristics are measured repeatedly during the learning process and when these data are used to adapt instruction in a systematic way. Building on these observations, we propose a novel, dynamic framework of personalization that conceptualizes learners as dynamic entities that change during and in interaction with the instructional process. As these dynamics manifest on different timescales, so do the opportunities for instructional adaptations--ranging from setting appropriate learning goals at the macroscale to reacting to affective-motivational fluctuations at the microscale. We argue that instructional design needs to take these dynamics into account in order to adapt to a specific learner at a specific point in time. Finally, we provide some examples of successful, dynamic adaptations and discuss future directions that arise from a dynamic conceptualization of personalization.

High sleep quality has been associated with beneficial outcomes across the life span. Intensive longitudinal studies suggest that these beneficial effects can also be observed on a day-to-day level. However, the dynamic interplay between subjective sleep quality and affective well-being in children's daily life has only rarely been investigated. The aims of the present work were (a) to replicate findings from a prior ambulatory assessment study in this area (Könen et al., 2016), (b) to explore the effect of subjective sleep quality on well-being throughout the day, and (c) to examine the reciprocal relation between subjective sleep quality and well-being in more detail. Data from two ambulatory assessment studies with children between 8 and 11 years (N = 108/84, with assessments over 28/21 consecutive days) consistently showed that positive affect was higher and negative affect was lower after nights with better sleep quality, and that the effects of subjective sleep quality were stronger on well-being assessed in the morning compared with later in the day. Results from dynamic structural equation models revealed reciprocal effects of subjective sleep quality and positive affect. Negative affect was not consistently related to worse subsequent sleep quality after controlling for positive affect and prior night's sleep quality. Results suggest a close relation of sleep quality and positive affect, which strengthens the idea behind interventions targeting both, children's sleep and well-being. Differences between children in the dynamic interplay between sleep and affect may be important predictors of long-term outcomes.

In the last two decades, e-diary studies have gained increasing interest, with a dominant focus on mood and affect. Although requested in current guidelines, psychometric properties are rarely reported, and methodological investigations of factor structure, model fit, and the reliability of mood and affect assessment are limited. We used a seven-day e-diary dataset of 189 adolescent participants (12–17 years). The e-diary affect assessments revealed a considerable portion of within-person variance. The six-factor model showed the best model fit compared to the less complex models. Factor loadings also improved with the complexity of the models. Accordingly, we recommend that future e-diary studies of adolescents use the six-factor model of affect as well as reporting psychometric properties and model fit. For future e-diary scale development, we recommend using a minimum of three items per scale to enable the use of confirmatory multilevel factor analyses.

Satisfaction and frustration of the basic psychological need for relatedness have been postulated to play a vital role for affective well-being. Yet, this prediction has not been thoroughly tested in schoolchildren's everyday lives. In this work, we examined the association between relatedness satisfaction and frustration at school on daily and average positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) using ambulatory assessment in three intensive longitudinal studies with children aged 9-12 (total N = 317). In Study 1, 4th to 6th graders reported their PA and NA 2 times daily and their relatedness satisfaction and frustration once a day for 2 weeks. In Study 2 and Study 3, 4th graders and 5th graders, respectively, reported their PA and NA 4 times daily and their relatedness satisfaction and frustration once a day for 4 weeks. Across the 3 studies, relatedness satisfaction and frustration were psychometrically separable and exhibited differential effects such that relatedness satisfaction was significantly associated primarily with PA, and relatedness frustration was significantly associated only with NA at between- and within-person levels. Explaining interindividual differences suggested that the association between daily relatedness and affective well-being was weaker for generally highly integrated children and stronger for usually rather excluded children.

The association between academic self-concept and achievement is assumed to be reciprocal. Typically, the association is analyzed by variants of the classical cross-lagged panel model. Results with more recently developed methodological approaches, for example, the random intercept cross-lagged panel model, its continuous-time implementation, and the latent change score model, are not available so far. The present study aimed to test the association between reading self-concept and reading achievement with different models to evaluate whether positive cross-lagged effects can be demonstrated with the alternative models. Drawing on a sample of 2,014 elementary students from Grade 1 to Grade 4, results of alternative models yielded noticeable differences. Support for reciprocal effects between reading self-concept and reading achievement was found using the classical and the full-forward cross-lagged panel models. No such effects were found in the other models. Thus, the reciprocal effect model can be called into question for elementary schoolchildren. The results are discussed with regard to the theoretical assumptions and appropriate methodological approaches.

Elementary schoolchildren's working memory performance (WMP) fluctuates from moment to moment and day to day, yet the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. In the present study, affective states were investigated as predictors of these fluctuations. Interindividual differences in the intraindividual affect--WMP associations were expected, and their structure was explored. One hundred nine children (8-11 years) were investigated in an ambulatory assessment. Affective states (positive affect [PA], negative affect [NA], activation, deactivation) and WMP were assessed 3 times daily for up to 31 consecutive days. In the whole sample, WMP was lower at occasions with higher NA or deactivation, while there was no overall effect of PA or activation. Results of a mixture model analysis revealed meaningful heterogeneity in these effects: Approximately half of the children showed comparably weaker effects of affect on WMP, while the other three groups showed (1) comparably stronger negative effects of NA and deactivation; (2) a comparably stronger positive effect of activation; or (3) comparably stronger negative effects of NA and deactivation and stronger positive effects of PA and activation. Findings emphasize the importance of explicitly considering interindividual differences in intraindividual associations. They are discussed in the context of current frameworks of interindividual differences in environmental sensitivity.

Abstract Background Digital phenotyping promises to unobtrusively obtaining a continuous and objective input of symptomatology from patients’ daily lives. The prime example are bipolar disorders, as smartphone parameters directly reflect bipolar symptomatology. Empirical studies, however, have yielded inconsistent findings. We believe that three main shortcomings have to be addressed to fully leverage the potential of digital phenotyping: short assessment periods, rare outcome assessments, and an extreme fragmentation of parameters without an integrative analytical strategy. Methods To demonstrate how to overcome these shortcomings, we conducted frequent (biweekly) dimensional and categorical expert ratings and daily self-ratings over an extensive assessment period (12 months) in 29 patients with bipolar disorder. Digital phenotypes were monitored continuously. As an integrative analytical strategy, we used structural equation modelling to build latent psychopathological outcomes (mania, depression) and latent digital phenotype predictors (sleep, activity, communicativeness). Outcomes Combining gold-standard categorical expert ratings with dimensional self and expert ratings resulted in two latent outcomes (mania and depression) with statistically meaningful factor loadings that dynamically varied over 299 days. Latent digital phenotypes of sleep and activity were associated with same-day latent manic psychopathology, suggesting that psychopathological alterations in bipolar disorders relate to domains (latent variables of sleep and activity) and not only to specific behaviors (such as the number of declined incoming calls). The identification of latent psychopathological outcomes that dimensionally vary on a daily basis will enable to empirically determine which combination of digital phenotypes at which days prior to an upcoming episode are viable as digital prodromal predictors.

Over a century of research on between-person differences has resulted in the consensus that human cognitive abilities are hierarchically organized, with a general factor, termed general intelligence or “g,” uppermost. Surprisingly, it is unknown whether this body of evidence is informative about how cognition is structured within individuals. Using data from 101 young adults performing nine cognitive tasks on 100 occasions distributed over six months, we find that the structures of individuals’ cognitive abilities vary among each other, and deviate greatly from the modal between-person structure. Working memory contributes the largest share of common variance to both between- and within-person structures, but the g factor is much less prominent within than between persons. We conclude that between-person structures of cognitive abilities cannot serve as a surrogate for within-person structures. To reveal the development and organization of human intelligence, individuals need to be studied over time.

Older adults show relatively minor age-related decline in memory for single items, while their memory for associations is markedly reduced. Inter-individual differences in memory function in older adults are substantial but the neurobiological underpinnings of such differences are not well understood. In particular, the relative importance of inter-individual differences in the medio-temporal lobe (MTL) and the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) for associative and item recognition in older adults is still ambiguous. We therefore aimed to first establish the distinction between inter-individual differences in associative memory (recollection-based) performance and item memory (familiarity-based) performance in older adults and subsequently link these two constructs to differences in cortical thickness in the MTL and lateral PFC regions, in a latent structural equation modelling framework. To this end, a sample of 160 older adults (65–75 years old) performed three intentional item-associative memory tasks, of which a subsample (n ​= ​72) additionally had cortical thickness measures in MTL and PFC regions of interest available. The results provided support for a distinction between familiarity-based item memory and recollection-based associative memory performance in older adults. Cortical thickness in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex was positively correlated with associative recognition performance, above and beyond any relationship between item recognition performance and cortical thickness in the same region and between associative recognition performance and brain structure in the MTL (parahippocampus). The findings highlight the relative importance of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in allowing for intentional recollection-based associative memory functioning in older adults.

The present longitudinal study aimed to investigate the influence of ADHD symptoms on reading development in elementary schoolchildren. To this end, repeated assessments of ADHD symptoms (teacher ratings of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity) and reading achievement (standardized tests of decoding speed and text comprehension) were examined in a sample comprising 2,014 elementary schoolchildren at the end of Grades 1, 2, 3, respectively, and in the middle of Grade 4. Latent change score models revealed that the level of ADHD symptoms was associated with lower levels and less growth in decoding speed and text comprehension. Furthermore, individual differences in changes in ADHD symptoms and reading performance were negatively associated. Together, these results indicate commonalities in the development of ADHD symptomatology and reading achievement throughout elementary school.

Children experience good and bad days in their performance. Although this phenomenon is well-known to teachers, parents, and students it has not been investigated empirically. We examined whether children's working memory performance varies systematically from day to day and to which extent fluctuations at faster timescales (i.e., occasions, moments) contribute to daily WM fluctuations in the school context. In an ambulatory assessment study, Grade 3 and Grade 4 students (8 to 11 years old; N = 110) completed WM tasks on smartphones 3 times a day in school and at home for 4 weeks. Results showed substantial within-person fluctuations in children's daily WM performance. Across task conditions, day-to-day, occasion-to-occasion, and moment-to-moment variability accounted for roughly the same extent of observed day-to-day variability with large individual differences in the amount of reliable fluctuations at the different timescales. Grade 3 students were more variable than were Grade 4 students at the faster timescales, more variable WM performance at all timescales was related to lower school achievement, and more day-to-day variability was associated with lower fluid intelligence. These findings build the foundation for research on the antecedents and consequences of children's fluctuating cognitive resources. Theories about cognitive development and learning should consider performance fluctuations across and within days to understand the processes underlying long-term changes. Educational practice may be informed by the substantial WM fluctuations at all timescales and adopt interventions that increase children's attentional focus and self-regulation.

The ability to narrate stories and a synchronic self-concept develop in the pre- and primary school years. Life story theory proposes that both developments extend to an even later developmental stage, that is, to adolescents' acquisition of a coherent life story. Cross-sectional evidence supports the emergence of a life story in adolescence, but is mixed in terms of later life span development. The present study examines longitudinally the development of global coherence in life narratives across almost the entire life span. Starting in 2003, a total of 172 participants narrated their lives over the course of 8 years (aged 16, 20, 24, 28, 44, and 69 when last tested) resulting in up to 4 life narratives per person. Three aspects of global life narrative coherence--temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence--were measured with global ratings and predicted by their respective textual indicators. Children lacked most aspects of global coherence. Almost all indicators of temporal and causal-motivational coherence increased substantially across adolescence up to early adulthood, as did thematic coherence, which continued to develop throughout middle adulthood.

Background: Recent studies have suggested substantial fluctuations of cognitive performance in adults both across and within days, but very little is known about such fluctuations in children. Children's sleep behavior might have an important influence on their daily cognitive resources, but so far this has not been investigated in terms of naturally occurring within-person variations in children's everyday lives. Methods: In an ambulatory assessment study, 110 elementary school children (8-11 years old) completed sleep items and working memory tasks on smartphones several times per day in school and at home for 4 weeks. Parents provided general information about the children and their sleep habits. Results: We identified substantial fluctuations in the children's daily cognitive performance, self-reported nightly sleep quality, time in bed, and daytime tiredness. All three facets were predictive of performance fluctuations in children's school and daily life. Sleep quality and time in bed were predictive of performance in the morning, and afternoon performance was related to current tiredness. The children with a lower average performance level showed a higher within-person coupling between morning performance and sleep quality. Conclusions: Our findings contribute important insights regarding a potential source of performance fluctuations in children. The effect of varying cognitive resources should be investigated further because it might impact children's daily social, emotional, and learning-related functioning. Theories about children's cognitive and educational development should consider fluctuations on micro-longitudinal scales (e.g., day-to-day) to identify possible mechanisms behind long-term changes.

Various theoretical accounts suggest that within-person effects relating to everyday experiences (assessed, e.g., via experience sampling studies or daily diary studies) are a central element for understanding between-person differences in future outcomes. In this regard, it is often assumed that the within-person effect of a time-varying predictor X on a time-varying mediator M contributes to the long-term development in an outcome variable Y. In the present work, we demonstrate that traditional multilevel mediation approaches fall short in capturing the proposed mechanism, however. We suggest that a model in which between-person differences in the strength of within-person effects predict the outcome Y mediated via mean levels in M more adequately aligns with the presumed theoretical account that within-person effects shape between-person differences. Using simulated data, we show that the central parameters of this multilevel structural equation model can be recovered well in most of the investigated scenarios. Our approach has important implications for whether or not to control for mean levels in models with within-person effects as predictors. We illustrate the model using empirical data targeting the question if the within-person association of occurrence of daily stressors (X) with daily experiences of negative affect (M) longitudinally predicts between-person differences in change in depressive symptoms (Y). Implications for other multilevel designs and intervention studies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Properties of psychological variables at the mean or variance level can differ between persons and within persons across multiple time points. For example, cross-sectional findings between persons of different ages do not necessarily reflect the development of a single person over time. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the difference between covariance structures, expressed by covariance matrices, that evolve between persons and within a single person over multiple time points. If these structures are identical at the population level, the structure is called ergodic. However, recent data confirms that ergodicity is not generally given, particularly not for cognitive variables. For example, the g factor that is dominant for cognitive abilities between persons seems to explain far less variance when concentrating on a single person’s data. However, other subdimensions of cognitive abilities seem to appear both between and within persons; that is, there seems to be a lower-dimensional subspace of cognitive abilities in which cognitive abilities are in fact ergodic. In this article, we present ergodic subspace analysis (ESA), a mathematical method to identify, for a given set of variables, which subspace is most important within persons, which is most important between person, and which is ergodic. Similar to the common spatial patterns method, the ESA method first whitens a joint distribution from both the between and the within variance structure and then performs a principle component analysis (PCA) on the between distribution, which then automatically acts as an inverse PCA on the within distribution. The difference of the eigenvalues allows a separation of the rotated dimensions into the three subspaces corresponding to within, between, and ergodic substructures. We apply the method to simulated data and to data from the COGITO study to exemplify its usage.

In the COGITO study (Schmiedek, Lövdén, & Lindenberger, 2010), 101 younger adults practiced 12 tests of perceptual speed, working memory, and episodic memory for over 100 daily 1-hr sessions. The intervention resulted in positive transfer to broad cognitive abilities, including reasoning and episodic memory. Here, we examine whether these ability-based transfer effects are maintained over time. Two years after the end of the training, 80 participants returned for follow-up assessments of the comprehensive battery of transfer tasks. We found reliable positive long-term transfer effects for reasoning and episodic memory, controlling for retest effects by including participants from the original control group. This shows, for the first time, that intensive cognitive training interventions can have long-term broad transfer at the level of cognitive abilities.

This study investigated associations between parenting stress in parents and self-reported stress in children with children's diurnal cortisol secretion and whether these associations are moderated by known stress-regulating capacities, namely child cognitive control. Salivary cortisol concentrations were assessed from awakening to evening on two weekend days from 53 6-to-7-year-old children. Children completed a cognitive control task and a self-report stress questionnaire with an experimenter, while parents completed a parenting stress inventory. Hierarchical, linear mixed effects models revealed that higher parenting stress was associated with overall reduced cortisol secretion in children, and this effect was moderated by cognitive control. Specifically, parenting stress was associated with reduced diurnal cortisol levels in children with lower cognitive control ability and not in children with higher cognitive control ability. There were no effects of self-reported stress in children on their cortisol secretion, presumably because 6-to-7-year-old children cannot yet self-report on stress experiences. Our results suggest that higher cognitive control skills may buffer the effects of parenting stress in parents on their children's stress regulation in middle childhood. This could indicate that training cognitive control skills in early life could be a target to prevent stress-related disorders.

Perceptual decision-making performance depends on several cognitive and neural processes. Here, we fit Ratcliff's diffusion model to accuracy data and reaction-time distributions from one numerical and one verbal two-choice perceptual-decision task to deconstruct these performance measures into the rate of evidence accumulation (i.e., drift rate), response criterion setting (i.e., boundary separation), and peripheral aspects of performance (i.e., nondecision time). These theoretical processes are then related to individual differences in brain activation by means of multiple regression. The sample consisted of 24 younger and 15 older adults performing the task in fMRI before and after 100 daily 1-hr behavioral training sessions in a multitude of cognitive tasks. Results showed that individual differences in boundary separation were related to striatal activity, whereas differences in drift rate were related to activity in the inferior parietal lobe. These associations were not significantly modified by adult age or perceptual expertise. We conclude that the striatum is involved in regulating response thresholds, whereas the inferior parietal lobe might represent decision-making evidence related to letters and numbers.

Many social interactions require the synchronization--be it automatically or intentionally--of one's own behavior with that of others. Using a dyadic drumming paradigm, the authors delineate lifespan differences in interpersonal action synchronization (IAS). Younger children, older children, younger adults, and older adults in same- and mixed-age dyads were instructed to drum in synchrony with their interaction partner at a constant, self-chosen tempo. Adult-only dyads showed the highest and children-only the lowest levels of IAS accuracy. It is important to note that children improved reliably in IAS accuracy when paired with older partners. The observed age-related differences in IAS accuracy remained reliable after statistically controlling for individual differences in the ability to synchronize to a metronome and for between-dyad differences in tempo. The authors conclude that IAS improves from middle childhood to adulthood and that adult interaction partners may facilitate its development. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures and 6 footnotes.)

The present study used the German Aging Semantic Differential (ASD) to assess attitudes toward younger and older adults in a heterogeneous sample of n = 151 younger and n = 143 older adults. The questionnaire was administered in two versions, one referring to the evaluation of younger adults, the other to the evaluation of older adults. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis replicated the four-factor solution reported in the literature. Younger compared to older adults were rated as higher in terms of instrumentality (i.e., more active, adaptive to change) and integrity (i.e., more personally satisfied, at peace with oneself), whereas older adults were described as more autonomous and self-sufficient than younger adults. Younger participants reported more negative attitudes toward younger and older adults in some of the factors than did older participants. Structural equation modeling furthermore showed that attitudes correlated with personality characteristics and positive and negative affect, in that more agreeable, extraverted, and positively tempered participants reported less negative attitudes toward younger and older adults. Results are discussed in the context of multidimensional assessment of age stereotypes. (Contains 4 tables, 4 figures, and 4 notes.)

How to best measure working memory capacity is an issue of ongoing debate. Besides established complex span tasks, which combine short-term memory demands with generally unrelated secondary tasks, there exists a set of paradigms characterized by continuous and simultaneous updating of several items in working memory, such as the n-back, memory updating, or alpha span tasks. With a latent variable analysis (N = 96) based on content-heterogeneous operationalizations of both task families, the authors found a latent correlation between a complex span factor and an updating factor that was not statistically different from unity (r = 0.96). Moreover, both factors predicted fluid intelligence (reasoning) equally well. The authors conclude that updating tasks measure working memory equally well as complex span tasks. Processes involved in building, maintaining, and updating arbitrary bindings may constitute the common working memory ability underlying performance on reasoning, complex span, and updating tasks. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

The worst performance rule for cognitive tasks [Coyle, T.R. (2003). IQ, the worst performance rule, and Spearman's law: A reanalysis and extension. "Intelligence," 31, 567-587] in which reaction time is measured is the result that IQ scores correlate better with longer (i.e., 0.7 and 0.9 quantile) reaction times than shorter (i.e., 0.1 and 0.3 quantile) reaction times. We show that this pattern of correlations can be predicted by the diffusion model [Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. "Psychological Review," 85, 59-108], in two ways: either assuming that the rate of accumulation of information toward a decision is higher for higher IQ subjects or assuming that the criterial amounts of information they require before a decision are lower. Importantly, the model explains both reaction times and accuracy, so the two possibilities can be distinguished.

The authors bring together approaches from cognitive and individual differences psychology to model characteristics of reaction time distributions beyond measures of central tendency. Ex-Gaussian distributions and a diffusion model approach are used to describe individuals' reaction time data. The authors identified common latent factors for each of the 3 ex-Gaussian parameters and for 3 parameters central to the diffusion model using structural equation modeling for a battery of choice reaction tasks. These factors had differential relations to criterion constructs. Parameters reflecting the tail of the distribution (i.e., t in the ex-Gaussian and drift rate in the diffusion model) were the strongest unique predictors of working memory, reasoning, and psychometric speed. Theories of controlled attention and binding are discussed as potential theoretical explanations.