Cognitive performance and cerebral hemispheric function are known to vary with fluctuating levels of estradiol and progesterone across the menstrual cycle in naturally cycling females. However, the literature is mixed with regard to how each hemisphere may be affected by elevated ovarian hormones. To better understand this, the current study employed a dual-task paradigm to examine potential shifts in hemispheric involvement for a verbal problem-solving task across the menstrual cycle in 30 right-handed, normally cycling young adult females (18–21 years old). To our knowledge, no study to date has utilized dual-task procedures to directly investigate the potential shifts in hemispheric function across the menstrual cycle. Specifically, participants were tested during both menses and their estimated midluteal phase where they engaged in repetitive unilateral finger-tapping while concurrently solving anagrams silently or aloud. Analysis of finger-tapping interference during the dual-task conditions revealed that solving anagrams silently was lateralized to the left hemisphere while solving anagrams aloud yielded a pattern of more bilateral hemispheric involvement, both of which were consistent across both menses and midluteal phases. Analysis of cognitive performance, however, revealed that silent anagrams performance while tapping with the right, but not left, hand significantly increased during the midluteal phase. Consistent with a number of other studies using different methodological approaches, the current dual-task findings suggest that when ovarian hormone levels are putatively elevated, there is enhanced recruitment of left hemisphere resources while performing a lateralized verbal task.

The relationship between consistency of hand preference, left hemispheric specialization, and cognitive functioning was examined in an ongoing longitudinal investigation. Children were classified as consistent or inconsistent in their hand preference across 5 assessments from ages 18 to 42 months. Findings demonstrated that (a) this early classification continued to reveal differences in cognitive functioning from 10 to 17 years but only for girls, (b) consistent girls' performances were continually higher relative to the inconsistent girls on measures of verbal intelligence and reading achievement, (c) differences between the female groups were specifically related to left-hemispheric language specialization, and (d) one factor influencing the consistent girls' development may be the amount of reading exposure received during infancy.

Eagly’s social role theory (Eagly and Steffen 1984) was tested examining children’s gender role stereotypes via implicit information processing and memory measures. We explored whether children’s occupational stereotypes were less restrictive for females who engaged in counterstereotypic occupations (Mary-Doctor) compared to males who engaged in counterstereotypic occupations (Henry-Nurse). Fifty-seven American eight- and nine-year-olds from a southwestern city were orally presented with stereotypic male and female names paired with masculine and feminine occupations and asked to create sentences using the name-occupation pairs. We conducted analyses of the created sentences as well as tested children’s memories for the various pairings. Consistent with social role theory, the findings revealed that children’s gender role stereotypes were more restrictive for males, than for females.

The present study examined relationships between emotional intelligence, measured by the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, and right hemisphere dominance for a free vision chimeric face test. A sample of 122 ethnically diverse college students participated and completed online versions of the forenamed tests. A hierarchical regression was performed to test for the hypothesized interaction between gender and EI on the right hemisphere bias score. No significant main effects were found for gender or total EI score. However, when entered into the model, the interaction term contributed an additional 4.5% of the variance in right hemisphere dominance for the processing of facial emotions. Descriptively, men with greater EI were associated with higher right hemisphere dominance in the free vision test, while no association was observed for women.

This paper is concerned with the use of _hand held electronie games and microcotputers in places of public access and in the home. The paper consist& of four, sections. The first section prevides é description of the different activities supporte'd by this technology. Game playing is an activity common to both hand held devices and microcomputers. Indeed, game playing is a major introductory use of microcomputers. Thus, an important entry point for research concerning the impact of this technology on informal learning will involve an analysis of the factors which affect the child's interest in electronic game playing and evaluation of the Rinds of learning opportunities provided by these games. Specifically, what makes these games so captivating and how do they influence children's learning? The second section of the paper is concerned with the motivational aspects of microelectronic game playing. An exemplary study by-Bilune (1980) concerning attributes of popular computer games is discussed. Also, the effects of external constraints on intrinsically motivated activities, like electronic game playing are examined. A considenation of the types of learning which can be influenced by electronic game playing is presented in the third section. In order to illustrate how "cognitive learning strategies" might be affected, a general description of developmental and population (e.g., socioeconomic status) differences in learning and memory is provided. A discussion of factors which may be responsible for changes in strategy use is

The present study examined gender schema encoding (activation of gender stereotypes) in the absence deliberate purposes relating to people (stereotype application). A release from proactive interference short-term-memory task was used. College (Experiment 1) and sixth-grade (Experiment 2) participants were asked to retain item identity and sequence information for briefly presented stimulus sets of occupational names. Buildup and release from PI, when the stimulus set was shifted to the alternate gender signification, was found for both age groups. This result was interpreted to reflect a change in the encoding attribute for the stimulus sets—an encoding change that occurs without intention or deliberate processing. Effect-size estimates for release from PI suggested a developmental increase in gender schema encoding. The discussion of results considers the development of an individual difference index of gender scheme processing based on the release from PI method.

Two experiments were conducted using dual-task finger-tapping procedures to examine cerebral hemisphere laterization for mental versus manual rotation. Actual three-dimensional block-designs based on Shepard and Metzler's (1971) abstract three-dimensional cubes were constructed. Forty-eight right-handed introductory psychology students participated in each study. The first experiment showed greater right-hand than left-hand interference for mental rotation implicating more left-hemisphere involvement. In contrast, more left-hand than right-hand finger-tapping disruption with manual rotation was observed suggesting more right-hemisphere involvement. A second experiment was conducted to determine if the right-hemisphere involvement found with manual rotation was due to the manual activity of handling and rotating the blocks. Results showed that dual-task interference produced by irrelevant manual rotation combined with mental rotation was not lateralized. Thus, the pattern of results indicate that the manipulospatial processing required in the first experiment was responsible for the asymmetry implicating right-hemisphere involvement.

The present study examines gender differences in children's encoding of gender-connotation from words. The release from proactive interference method was used to measure gender-connotation encoding. Forty-eight third-grade children attending a public elementary school serving a predominantly White middle-socioeconomic-status community participated and were presented with stimulus words in print. The design of the study can be characterized as a two (gender) by two (condition: control vs. experimental) by four (trials) factorial. Results revealed reliable proactive interference buildup and release for gender-connotation for girls, but not for boys. This new finding, taken together with extant research, demonstrates that while both boys and girls have the ability to encode gender-connotation from aurally presented words, the spontaneous activation of gender-connotation attributes with print is not guaranteed for boys.

This study constitutes a multitask appraisal of cerebral hemisphere specialization with 13 monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs discordant for handedness. Tasks included dichotic listening, finger tapping with concurrent loads, two tachistoscopic visual half-field tests, and a free-vision face test. Overall, MZ twins showed similar performance asymmetries on most tasks. Different asymmetries, however, were observed on the finger tapping with anagram load and visual half-field with chair stimuli. In these instances, asymmetries for left- and right-handed MZ twins were more similar to patterns reported in the literature for left- and right-handed singletons, respectively, than for opposite-handed co-twins.

Dual-task procedures-elaborative strategy use and finger-tapping-were used to examine both recall and mental effort demands of elaboration strategy use with equal numbers of boys and girls at grades two and three. Knowledge-base access was examined by comparing different item types in the associative learning list: masculine, feminine, and mixed. Results showed that boys and girls did not differ in their recall of arbitrarily paired items (e.g., mixed pairs). A Sex by Item Type (masculine vs feminine) interaction, however, revealed that for feminine pairs girls recalled more than boys, whereas for masculine pairs no sex difference was observed. Finger tapping interference scores indexed mental effort. Similar to the recall findings, results indicated that the elaboration of feminine pairs required less mental effort by girls in contrast to boys. Elaboration of masculine pairs was not associated with a sex difference. The results were discussed in terms of sex differences in knowledge-base access.

The study was conducted to clarify factors involved in dual-task finger-tapping interference. Left-handers, as assessed by hand-writing preference and left-hand baseline tapping advantage, tapped both alone and while solving anagrams. Even though the left-hand baseline tapping advantage was experimentally removed on some (adjusted) trials, greater left- than right-hand tapping interference was observed during concurrent task performance. This result coupled with previous findings for right-handed subjects [Kee and Cherry, Neuropsychologia, Vol. 28, pp. 313-316, 1990] indicates that lateralized interference effects are not merely due to initial baseline tapping differences as proposed by Willis and Goodwin [Neuropsychologia, Vol. 25, pp. 719-724, 1987].

The present studies examined the relationships between knowledge-base access for elaborative events, children′s strategy use, and recall. Older children (grades four and five) and young adolescents (grades seven and eight) learned a mixed list of noun pairs that varied in knowledge-base access (accessible vs inaccessible). Subjects were instructed to generate sentences aloud (Experiment 1) or describe visual images aloud (Experiment 2) for each pair on study trials. Results showed that the pair descriptions could be reliably classified into the categories of Elaboration and Other Associative Strategies identified by Beuhring and Kee (1987). Overall, subjects made greater use of Other Associative Strategies than Elaboration. Sentence/image descriptions were more rapid for accessible than for inaccessible pairs and this difference was largest when subjects used Other Associative Strategies in contrast to Elaboration. For recall, on the other hand, the typical advantage of accessible pairs over inaccessible pairs was observed when subjects used Other Associative Strategies, but not Elaboration. Results also suggested an influence of the knowledge base on pair retrieval during cued recall (cue-offset to correct response onset): Subjects required less time to retrieve correct associates for accessible pairs than inaccessible pairs. The findings are discussed in terms of the effects of the resource demands of strategy use on the speed and effectiveness of strategy execution.

Verbal cerebral asymmetry was examined in 96 right- and left-handed college students using dual-task methods. The manual task was finger-tapping; verbal tasks were anagram-solution in silent and aloud conditions; nonverbal tasks were solution of Raven′s Progressive Matrices and forms memory. Both handedness groups were sensitive to the task manipulation, i.e., verbal tasks produced a significant change in tapping rate from a no-change rate of zero; nonverbal tasks produced no significant change in tapping rate. Right-handers experienced the expected asymmetric manual performance indicative of left-hemisphere language laterality. Left-handers as a group experienced no asymmetric pattern but rather a percentage decrease in both hands which suggested bilateralization of language functions. Only when examining manual performance patterns within specific left-handed subpopulations (composed of a complete crossing of handwriting posture, familial sinistrality, and sex) did laterality patterns emerge. Specifically, asymmetric manual performance was found only in familial sinistral inverted posture females. Results demonstrate the advantage of controlling for subject characteristics when assessing cerebral laterality in left-handers.

The deployment of memory strategies is resource demanding and more so for younger children than for older children and adults. The associative memory studies reviewed show that accessibility to relevant event knowledge is directly related to the resource demands of using an elaboration strategy. The greater efficiency of strategy use by older children and adults permits the use of available mental resources to support additional task-relevant processing of to-be-learned items. This additional processing might include alternate or more durable encodings of pair relationships, creation of retrieval opportunities (strategies), and effective strategy monitoring. The additional processing enabled by the freeing of information-processing resources is hypothesized to be responsible for the developmental increase in the efficacy of elaboration and other associative strategies. Knowledge access also affects the nature of the relational strategy selected and the recall benefits observed. Although increases in "elaboration" were hypothesized to account for developmental differences in associative memory, the evidence clearly shows that other associative strategies are also involved. Although these other associative strategies involve elaboration in a nontechnical sense, the observed dissociations between them and the elaboration strategy argue for maintaining the distinction. Moreover, further analysis is needed to understand the interactions between strategy selection and knowledge access. In this regard, the initial strategy deployed by a learner is dependent on his or her knowledge about the relative effectiveness of various relational associations and interactions with knowledge access. For example, a younger subject might forgo "elaboration" if the items are "captured" by an "other associative" relationship activated during strategy deployment (particularly if the initial search for an elaboration is very effortful). In contrast, an older subject might persevere at retrieving a relevant event because of his or her knowledge about the benefits of encoding "direct" interactions for pair members. The learner's subsequent strategy selection, either for additional processing or encoding of new pairs, is undoubtedly more complex because of increases in the learner's knowledge about the relationships between strategy use, knowledge access, and resource demands. In conclusion, research examined in this chapter verified relationships between strategy use, mental effort, and knowledge access. Moreover, interactions between strategy use and knowledge access were exposed. These relationships are presumed to underlie developmental differences in the efficacy of memory strategies.