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In multimedia learning, there is a lot of new information that learners are exposed to, making it a cognitively intensive process. Poorly-designed multimedia lessons can introduce distractions that must be dealt with by the learner. However, learners do not all share the same skill at managing incoming information or holding capacity, which could create individual differences in the impact of multimedia lessons on learning and lead to inequity in learning. In three experiments, learners saw a multimedia lesson varying in the amount of distracting material included: high (Experiment 1), moderate (Experiment 2), or low (Experiment 3). Learners took a posttest and completed tasks to assess individual differences in managing incoming information (executive function) and holding capacity (working memory capacity). When distractions were present (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2), executive function was related to posttest performance such that as executive functioning increased, performance on the posttest increased. However, when distractions were not present (Experiment 3), executive function was not related to posttest performance. Individual differences in working memory capacity were not related to posttest performance at any level of distraction. This indicates the importance of considering individual differences in learners' executive functioning in the design of multimedia lessons.

Memory decision-making in 26- to 32-month-olds was investigated using visual-paired comparison paradigms, requiring toddlers to select familiar stimuli (Active condition) or view familiar and novel stimuli (Passive condition). In Experiment 1 (N = 108, 54.6% female, 62% White; replication N = 98), toddlers with higher accuracy in the Active condition showed reduced novelty preference in that condition, but not in the Passive condition (d = -0.11). In Experiment 2 (N = 78; 52.6% female; 70.5% White), a brief 5% increase in target size boosted gaze transitions across conditions (d = 0.50) and accuracy in the Active condition (d = 0.53). Overall, evidence suggests that better attentional distribution can support decision-making. Research was conducted between 2014 and 2020 in Northern California.

Although research suggests that phone usage during academic activities is problematic for learning and performance, little is known about high school students' digital multitasking during homework. This exploratory descriptive study surveyed 135 students from four public U.S. high schools to investigate teenagers' attitudes towards digital distraction, smartphone use during homework, cell phone dependence, and motivations for digital multitasking. Our findings suggested that teens were distracted during homework about 38% of the time, and both mind-wandering and the use of digital devices contributed to this distraction. Of the students surveyed, 64% believed that they should focus more during homework than they currently did, and most were willing to try strategies such as silencing their phone or putting it out of sight. However, many were not currently using such strategies, and our data suggested that students may be spending approximately 204 h per year trying to complete homework but unintentionally distracted from it. We explored their current motivations and beliefs as a necessary first step for the creation of future interventions to help teens reduce their digital multitasking during homework.

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead varies in a graded manner on the basis of quantitative differences in physical salience. Infants viewed arrays of four or six items; one item was a singleton and the other items were identical distractors (e.g., a single cookie and three identical toy cars). At both ages, infants looked to the singletons first more often, were faster to look at singletons, and looked longer at singletons. However, when a computational model was used to quantify the relative salience of the singleton in each display--which varied widely among the different singleton-distractor combinations--we found a strong, graded effect of physical salience on attention and no evidence that singleton status per se influenced attention. In addition, consistent with other research on attention in infancy, the effect of salience was stronger for 6-month-old infants than for 8-month-old infants. Taken together, these results show that attention-getting and attention-holding in infancy vary continuously with quantitative variations in physical salience rather than depending in a categorical manner on whether an item is unique.

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a systematic change in course modalities due to the nationwide suspension of in-person instruction, resulting in the transition to emergency remote distance learning via Zoom. This transition certainly facilitated affordances of flexibility and continuity, but with it brought issues of unfamiliarity, lack of confidence, anxiety, distractions, and validity from both the instructors and the student perspectives. This in situ study aimed to better understand the students' learning experiences with Zoom by assessing the social, cognitive, and behavioral factors influencing learner's mind-wandering and its effect on online engagement. Undergraduate students from 14 classes across two research institutions in California (N = 633) were recruited to participate in an online survey while distance learning through a pandemic. Structural equation modeling was used to conduct a path analysis to explain the factors impacting students' online engagement mediated by students' frequency to mind-wander. Study findings revealed that (1) self-efficacy and trait anxiety had significant direct effects on students' mind-wandering; (2) self-efficacy, trait anxiety, task-value beliefs, and mind-wandering had significant direct effects on students' online engagement; and finally (3) the frequency of students' mind-wandering partially mediated the relationship between self-efficacy and engagement and between trait anxiety and engagement. Identifying these structural relationships further confirmed our hypotheses on sources contributing to students' mind-wandering while learning remotely, provided insights into potential mechanisms underpinning students' online engagement, and suggests practical pedagogical learning experience design recommendations for instructors to immediately implement while teaching and learning with Zoom.

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether this shift is truly global, that is, consistent across and within stimuli despite variations in content. To test the global shift hypothesis, we recorded eye movements of 89 children (6 months to 10 years) and adults while they viewed 7 video clips. We measured the extent to which each participant attended to faces and to salient areas for each video. There was no evidence of global age-related changes in attention: Neither feature showed consistent increases or decreases with age. Moreover, windowed analyses within each stimulus video revealed significant moment-to-moment variations in the relation between age and each visual feature (via a bootstrapping analysis). For some time windows, adults looked more often at both feature types compared to infants and children. However, for other time windows, the pattern was reversed--younger participants looked more at faces and salient locations. Lack of consistent directional effects provides strong evidence against the global shift hypothesis. We suggest an alternative explanation: Over development, observers increasingly prioritize when and where to look by learning to track which features are relevant within a scene. Implications for the development of visual attention and children's understanding of screen-based media are discussed.

Executive function is the set of cognitive skills needed for goal directed behavior and is a strong predictor of academic success (Best, 2014). The present study examines the effectiveness of a custom video game designed to train the executive function skill of shifting--being able to efficiently shift attention from 1 task to another. In Experiment 1, students who played Alien Game for 4 hr, mostly at home, improved shifting skill more than those who played a word-search control game (d = 0.40). In Experiment 2, students who played All You Can ET (an updated version of Alien Game) for 2 hr improved shifting skill more than those who played a word-search control game (d = 0.36), regardless of whether the aliens were designed to portray hot or cool emotions. In addition, playing All You Can ET, which targets shifting skill, did not cause an improvement on inhibition skill, which represents a different kind of executive function. These results extend previous findings (Parong et al., 2017), and highlight a somewhat rare case in which playing a focused computer game for a short duration causes improvements in a targeted executive function skill. Overall, the results support the theory of specific transfer of general skills, which suggests that game-based training of cognitive skills should focus on concentrated practice on a target skill to train the target skill rather than divided practice across multiple different skills in an attempt to improve the mind in general.

Research consistently demonstrates that attention deficits have a deleterious effect on academic achievement. Impairments in attention, and not hyperactivity/impulsivity, are associated with learning difficulties and academic problems in students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). To date, most studies have focused on symptoms of hyperactivity/impulsivity, with little research being conducted on interventions for students with ADHD, inattentive subtype. This study examines the use of neurofeedback as an intervention to improve reading achievement in a public school setting. A multiple-baseline-across-participants single-case model was used to assess five fourth-grade students who received 40 daily sessions of neurofeedback. Following the intervention, improvements were observed on objective measures of attention: a continuous performance test (Integrated Visual and Auditory Continuous Performance Test [IVA+Plus]) and/or a test of shifting attention (CNS Vital Signs, Shifting Attention Test [CNS-VS, SAT]). Results on tests of reading fluency revealed little change, although participants demonstrated gains on a measure of reading comprehension (Gray Oral Reading Tests-Fifth Edition [GORT-5]). Results suggest that neurofeedback helped participants to become more accurately engaged with the text with more focused attention to content. Thus, neurofeedback may be a viable option to assist children with attention deficits for improving both attention and reading achievement. [Additional funding for this research was provided by the Foundation for Neurofeedback and Neuromodulation Research (formerly, the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research Foundation) and Brain Science International. This article was published in "NeuroRegulation," v3 n2 p55-77 2016.]

Two intervention approaches designed to address the multifaceted academic and cognitive difficulties of low-income children who enter pre-K with very low math knowledge were tested in a randomized experiment. Blocking on classroom, children who met screening criteria were assigned to a Math + Attention condition in which the Pre-Kindergarten Mathematics Tutorial (PKMT) intervention was implemented (4 days/week for 24 weeks) in addition to 16 adaptive attention training sessions, a Math-Only condition using the PKMT intervention, or a business-as-usual condition. Five hundred eighteen children were assessed at pretest and posttest. There was a significant effect of the PKMT intervention on a broad measure of informal mathematical knowledge and a small but significant effect on a measure of numerical knowledge. Attention training was associated with small effects on attention, but did not provide additional benefit for mathematics. A main effect of state on math outcomes was associated with a stronger, numeracy-focused Tier 1 mathematics curriculum in one state. Findings are discussed with respect to increasing intensity of math-specific and domain-general interventions for young children at risk for mathematical learning difficulties.

Recently, a great deal of research has demonstrated that although everyday experience is continuous in nature, it is parsed into separate events. The aim of the present study was to examine whether event structure can influence the effectiveness of cognitive control. Across 5 experiments we varied the structure of events within the AX-CPT by shifting the spatial location of cues and probes on a computer screen. When location shifts were present, a pattern of AX-CPT performance consistent with enhanced cognitive control was found. To test whether the location shift effects were caused by the presence of event boundaries per se, other aspects of the AX-CPT were manipulated, such as the color of cues and probes and the inclusion of a distractor task during the cue-probe delay. Changes in cognitive control were not found under these conditions, suggesting that the location shift effects were specifically related to the formation of separate event models. Together, these results can be accounted for by the Event Horizon Model and a representation-based theory of cognitive control, and suggest that cognitive control can be influenced by the surrounding environmental structure.

This study evaluated whether the positive association between early autonomy-supportive parenting and children's subsequent achievement is mediated by children's executive functions. Using observations of mothers' parenting from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,306), analyses revealed that mothers' autonomy support over the first 3 years of life predicted enhanced executive functions (i.e., inhibition, delay of gratification, and sustained attention) during the year before kindergarten and academic achievement in elementary and high school even when mothers' warmth and cognitive stimulation, as well as other factors (e.g., children's early general cognitive skills and mothers' educational attainment) were covaried. Mediation analyses demonstrated that over and above other attributes (e.g., temperament), children's executive functions partially accounted for the association between early autonomy-supportive parenting and children's subsequent achievement.

Tests of working memory capacity (WMC) and fluid intelligence (gF) are thought to capture variability in a crucial cognitive capacity that is broadly predictive of success, yet pinpointing the exact nature of this capacity is an area of ongoing controversy. We propose that mind-wandering is associated with performance on tests of WMC and gF, thereby partially explaining both the reliable correlations between these tests and their broad predictive utility. Existing evidence indicates that both WMC and gF are correlated with performance on tasks of attention, yet more decisive evidence requires an assessment of the role of attention and, in particular, mind-wandering during performance of these tests. Four studies employing complementary methodological designs embedded thought sampling into tests of general aptitude and determined that mind-wandering was consistently associated with worse performance on these measures. Collectively, these studies implicate the capacity to avoid mind-wandering during demanding tasks as a potentially important source of success on measures of general aptitude, while also raising important questions about whether the previously documented relationship between WMC and mind-wandering can be exclusively attributed to executive failures preceding mind-wandering (McVay & Kane, 2010b). (Contains 4 figures, 3 tables and 5 footnotes.)

Ample evidence suggests that global perception may involve low spatial frequency (LSF) processing and that local perception may involve high spatial frequency (HSF) processing (Shulman, Sullivan, Gish, & Sakoda, 1986; Shulman & Wilson, 1987; Robertson, 1996). It is debated whether SF selection is a low-level mechanism associating global and local information with "absolute" LSF and HSF content, or whether it is a higher level mechanism involving a selective process that defines the SF range in which global and local can then be "relatively" defined. The present study provides support for the latter claim by demonstrating that allocating attention to global or local levels of hierarchical displays biased selection of LSFs or HSFs, respectively, in subsequently presented compound gratings. This bias occurred despite a change in the response dimension (from letter identification in the hierarchical stimulus to orientation discrimination in the grating) and despite a difference in retinal location of the hierarchical stimuli and the grating stimulus. Moreover, the bias was determined by the relationship between the 2 SFs in the compound grating (i.e., their relative frequency) rather than the absolute SF values. (Contains 3 footnotes, 1 table, and 8 figures.)

Although cohort effects on IQ measures have been investigated extensively, studies exploring cohort differences on verbal memory tests, and the extent to which they are influenced by socioenvironmental changes across decades (e.g. educational attainment; ethnic makeup), have been limited. We examined differences in performance between the normative samples of the CVLT-II from 1999 and the CVLT3 from 2016 to 2017 on the immediate- and delayed-recall trials, and we explored the degree to which verbal learning and memory skills might be influenced by the cohort year in which norms were collected versus demographic factors (e.g. education level). Multivariate analysis of variance tests and follow-up univariate tests yielded evidence for a negative cohort effect (also referred to as negative Flynn effect) on performance, controlling for demographic factors (p =.001). In particular, findings revealed evidence of a negative Flynn effect on the attention/working memory and learning trials (Trial 1, Trial 2, Trial 3, Trials 1–5 Total, List B; ps <.007), with no significant cohort differences found on the delayed-recall trials. As expected, education level, age group, and ethnicity were significant predictors of CVLT performance (ps <.01). Importantly, however, there were no interactions between cohort year of norms collection and education level, age group, or ethnicity on performance. The clinical implications of the present findings for using word list learning and memory tests like the CVLT, and the potential role of socioenvironmental factors on the observed negative Flynn effect on the attention/working memory and learning trials, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]