Openness has been identified as one of the personality traits with stronger association to creativity into the Five-Factor Model of personality. But what are the psychological mechanisms that relate Openness and creative performance? The present paper aims at responding to this question, exploring in particular whether the attentional processing…

The aim of the present research is to assess the developmental pattern of the metacognitive knowledge of attention in Italian primary school students. Data were collected from 95 pupils divided into two age groups: the first (6-8 years) and second primary school cycles (8-10 years). The children were asked to perform two specific thematic drawings…

In the number-to-position task, with increasing age and numerical expertise, children's pattern of estimates shifts from a biased (nonlinear) to a formal (linear) mapping. This widely replicated finding concerns symbolic numbers, whereas less is known about other types of quantity estimation. In Experiment 1, Preschool, Grade 1, and Grade 3…

Perspective taking, defined as the ability to assume another's perspective, can be considered a multidimensional construct which is composed of three different components: cognitive, visual and affective. This study wanted to verify the possibility of promoting perspective taking in preschoolers using ecological training. The maintenance of…

The aim of this paper is to focus reader's attention on "mobile" use of iTunesU and USiena model, as future compensatory tools. Starting from multimedia learning theories, a mobile course model has been designed (USiena model) and the experimental method has been used to carry out a "pilot study" with 32 dyslexic students. The…

Recent neurological breakthroughs in our understanding of the Critical Period Hypothesis and prosody may suggest strategies on how phonics instruction could improve L2 language learning and in particular phoneme/grapheme decoding. We therefore conducted a randomised controlled-trial on the application of prosody and phonics techniques, to improve…

The effects of warning on false recognition and associated subjective experience of false recollection and familiarity were investigated in 7-to 13-year-old children and young adults (N = 259) using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two warning conditions (warning with an example of a critical lure and warning without an example of a…

Distraction during encoding has long been known to disrupt later memory performance. Contrary to this long-standing result, we show that detecting an infrequent target in a dual-task paradigm actually improves memory encoding for a concurrently presented word, above and beyond the performance reached in the full-attention condition. This absolute…

The purpose of the present study was to test the efficacy of a visuospatial working memory (WM) training in terms of its transfer effects and maintenance effects, in the young-old and old-old. Forty young-old and 40 old-old adults took part in the study. Twenty participants in each age group received training with a visuospatial WM task, whereas…

The current study reports on the use of Wiki as an online didactic tool to develop knowledge management (KM) processes in higher education. This study integrates social constructivist principles to learning where learners are pro-active and collaborative through higher order cognitive processes. The study was administered in two countries, namely…

The aim of the book is to serve for clinical, practical, basic and scholarly practices. In twentyfive chapters it covers the most important topics related to Autism Spectrum Disorders in the efficient way and aims to be useful for health professionals in training or clinicians seeking an update. Different people with autism can have very different…