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Childhood cognitive control is an important predictor for positive development, yet interventions seeking to improve it have provided mixed results. This is partly due to lack of clarity surrounding mechanisms of cognitive control, notably the role of inhibition and context monitoring. Here we use a randomized controlled trial to causally test the contributions of inhibition and context monitoring to cognitive control in childhood. Sixty children aged 6 to 9-years were assigned to three groups training either inhibition, context monitoring group or response speed using a gamified, highly variable and maximally adaptive training protocol. Whereas all children improved in the targeted cognitive functions over the course of training, pre-post data show that only the inhibition group improved on cognitive control. These data support a privileged role of inhibition in cognitive control during childhood. Further, gamified and maximally adaptive interventions hold promise for improving cognitive control at developmental periods of heightened plasticity.

A case based reasoning approach is introduced as a learning technique in the domain of machine translation of natural language. In our approach syntactical and semantic features are part of the cases in the case-base. To implement this, dependency analysers of sentences in the source and target languages are used. The case-base is filled with a learning mechanism that uses a parallel corpus of sentences with their translations. This case-base is used to make new translations.