Adele Diamond

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Psychiatry

Prescription drugs, and how they work in our bodies to treat different disorders, are fascinating. Here, we present one way to illustrate why a relatively common prescription drug (stimulants) affects two different areas of the brain so differently.

Science communication, or “scicomm” as it is colloquially known, can be a powerful tool to make neuroscience research relevant and accessible to a wider audience. We present here an example using the popular Avengers franchise to teach children about the brain and behaviour.

Purpose A growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits of exercise go far beyond physical health and may include cognitive gains. Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that challenges Executive Functions (EFs) and inspires children's commitment in an environment characterized by positive affect, inclusiveness, and camaraderie. The primary...

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Despite the increasing personalization of medicine, surprisingly ~37.0°C (98.6°F) continues as the estimate of normal temperature. We investigated between-subject and within-subject thermal variability, whether a significant percentage of individuals have a low mean oral temperature, and whether these differ by sex, age, time of day, ethnicity, bod...

That conditional, if-then reasoning does not emerge until 4–5 years has long been accepted. Here we show that children barely 3 years old can do conditional reasoning. All that was needed was a superficial change to the stimuli: When color was a property of the shapes (line drawings of a star and truck) rather than of the background (as in all past...

We present here the first evidence of the much-predicted double dissociation between the effect of stress on cognitive skills [executive functions (EFs)] dependent on prefrontal cortex (PFC) by catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) genotype. The COMT gene polymorphism with methionine (Met) at codon 158 results in more dopamine (DA) in PFC and general...

We report results showing success at 3 years on conditional discrimination (CD) -- 12-18 months younger than previously reported. Three-year-olds succeeded when color was a property of the stimulus, rather than a property of the background, as in all past CD testing. Previously, we and others found children succeed on the dimensional change card so...

This systematic review of executive function (EF) interventions is the largest such review thus far, including 179 studies from all over the world, reported in 193 papers. It covers all the ways that have been tried to improve EFs, including computerized and noncomputerized cognitive training, neurofeedback, school programs, physical activities, mi...

First, executive functions are defined. Then the development of executive functions in children, from infancy to 10-11 years of age, is briefly described. The relation between the speed of processing and the development of executive functions is addressed. Finally, tools and pointers for evaluating executive functioning in younger and older childre...

Developmental neuroimaging studies report the emergence of increasingly diverse cognitive functions as closely entangled with a rise-fall modulation of cortical thickness (CTh), structural cortical and white-matter connectivity, and a time-course for the experience-dependent selective elimination of the overproduced synapses. We examine which of tw...

Hypothesis: Children with ADHD will show better cognitive performance when on half their normal stimulant dose.

The kindergarten program, Tools of the Mind (Tools), has been shown to improve executive functions (as assessed by laboratory measures) and academic performance. The objective here was to see if Tools can improve executive functions in the real world (in the classroom), academic outcomes not previously investigated, reduce bullying and peer ostraci...

We completed a comprehensive systematic review of studies of all the different approaches (improving executive functions (EFs) across all ages (including 68 physical-activity interventions). EFs include abilities like selective attention, self-control, reasoning, and problem-solving. All studies evaluated had ≥ 1 objective behavioral EF measure bes...

Hypothesis: Children with ADHD will show better cognitive performance when on half their normal stimulant dose.

Approaches with more in-person interaction between trainer and trainees (especially Mindfulness approaches involving movement [e.g., t’ai chi & taekwondo] and promising school programs [e.g., MindUP & Tools of the Mind]) have been more successful at improving EFs than any computerized approach.

Prenatal exposure to maternal mood disturbances shapes children's cognitive development reflected in the critical construct of executive functions (EFs). Little is known, however, about underlying mechanisms. By examining cortisol responses in both everyday and lab challenge settings, we tested whether the child/offspring hypothalamic–pituitary–adr...

Objective To summarise the current evidence on the effects of physical activity (PA) interventions on cognitive and academic performance in children, and formulate research priorities and recommendations. Design Systematic review (following PRISMA guidelines) with a methodological quality assessment and an international expert panel. We based the...

The objective of this study was to investigate how patterns of maternal depressive symptoms from mid-pregnancy to 3 years postpartum are associated with children’s behavior at age 3 years and executive functions. Maternal depressive symptoms were measured from mid-pregnancy to 3 years postpartum. Growth mixture modeling was used on standardized mat...

Prior research has suggested an association between increased musical training and extra-musical outcomes, but these studies are primarily correlational, focused on instrumental music, and provide limited information about the type of musical intervention. In the current study, we perform the first randomized controlled study investigating whether...

Children, indeed, people of all ages, arc affected in many positive ways by interacting with pets and companion animals. Human-animal interac· tion (HAI) can be socially, emotionally, physically, and cognitively beneficial. Our particular speciality happens to be executive functions (EFs), those vitally important mental processes that form the basi...

The ‘Executive Functions’ (EFs) of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility enable us to think before we act, resist temptations or impulsive reactions, stay focused, reason, problem-solve, flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities, and see things from new and different perspectives. These skills are critical for success...

Schools are curtailing programs in arts, physical exercise, and play to devote more time and resources to academic instruction. Yet doing that may impede academic success, rather than aid it. Correlational and retrospective studies, personal accounts, case studies, and theoretical arguments suggest that the arts (e.g., music, dance, and theatre) an...

Studies of the cognitive benefits of physical activity need to move beyond simple aerobic activities that require little thought (treadmill running, riding a stationary bicycle, or rapid walking) and resistance training. Many studies have looked at this in older adults, and the evidence points strongly to those activities having little or no cognit...

The authors hypothesized that a social and emotional learning (SEL) program involving mindfulness and caring for others, designed for elementary school students, would enhance cognitive control, reduce stress, promote well-being and prosociality, and produce positive school outcomes. To test this hypothesis, 4 classes of combined 4th and 5th grader...

Although interpersonal conflict is ubiquitous in the workplace, studies show that individuals often avoid conflict, which can have detrimental effects for the individual, team, and organization. Limited research has explored how conflict avoidance can be reduced. In the present paper the authors theorized that conflict avoidance could be lessened b...

Executive functions (EFs; which make possible mentally playing with ideas, giving the considered rather than impulsive response, resisting temptations, staying focused, problem solving, and creatively meeting unanticipated challenges) suffer if we are sad, stressed, lonely, or not physically fit. Any of those can cause us to appear to have an EF di...

Children are slower and more error-prone when the correct response is counter to their initial inclination (incongruent trials) than when they just need to do what comes naturally (congruent trials). Children are almost always tested on a congruent-trial block and then on an incongruent-trial block. That order of testing makes it impossible to dete...

Prenatal exposure to serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) antidepressants and maternal depression may affect prefrontal cognitive skills (executive functions; EFs) including self-control, working memory and cognitive flexibility. We examined long-term effects of prenatal SRI exposure on EFs to determine whether effects are moderated by maternal mood...

22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) and Williams syndrome (WS) are common neurogenetic microdeletion syndromes. The aim of the present study was to compare the neuropsychiatric and neurocognitive phenotypes of 22q11.2DS and WS. Forty-five individuals with 22q11.2DS, 24 with WS, 22 with idiopathic developmental disability (DD) and 22 typically dev...

Executive functions (EFs; e.g., reasoning, working memory, and self-control) can be improved. Good news indeed, since EFs are critical for school and job success and for mental and physical health. Various activities appear to improve children’s EFs. The best evidence exists for computer-based training, traditional martial arts, and two school curr...

Executive functions (EFs) make possible mentally playing with ideas; taking the time to think before acting; meeting novel, unanticipated challenges; resisting temptations; and staying focused. Core EFs are inhibition [response inhibition (self-control-resisting temptations and resisting acting impulsively) and interference control (selective atten...

Understanding (a) how responses become prepotent provides insights into when inhibition is needed in everyday life. Understanding (b) how response prepotency is overcome provides insights for helping children develop strategies for overcoming such tendencies. Concerning (a), on tasks such as the day-night Stroop-like task, is the difficulty with in...

Cognitive control functions ("executive functions" [EFs] such as attentional control, self-regulation, working memory, and inhibition) that depend on prefrontal cortex (PFC) are critical for success in school and in life. Many children begin school lacking needed EF skills. Disturbances in EFs occur in many mental health disorders, such as ADHD and...

Methylphenidate (MPH) is commonly used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in all children, including those with velocardiofacial syndrome (VCFS). Yet concerns have been raised regarding its safety and efficacy in VCFS. The goal of this study was to examine the safety and efficacy of MPH in children with VCFS. Thirty-four child...

We agree with Strayhorn and Strayhorn that modern and traditional versions of martial arts differ. We tried to emphasize that modern American martial arts (which emphasize “punching and kicking” and competition) have been found to make unproductive behaviors worse, whereas evidence indicates

To be successful takes creativity, flexibility, self-control, and discipline. Central to all those are executive functions, including mentally playing with ideas, giving a considered rather than an impulsive response, and staying focused. Diverse activities have been shown to improve children’s executive functions: computerized training, noncompute...

To be successful takes creativity, flexibility, self-control, and discipline. Central to all those are executive functions, including mentally playing with ideas, giving a considered rather than an impulsive response, and staying focused. Diverse activities have been shown to improve children's executive functions: computerized training, noncompute...

Existing evidence suggests that the organization of cognitive functions may differentiate during development. We investigated two key components of executive functions, memory maintenance and inhibitory control, by applying latent factor models appropriate for examining developmental differences in functional associations among aspects of cognition...

If we want the best academic outcomes, the most efficient and cost-effective route to achieve that is, counterintuitively, not to narrowly focus on academics, but to also address children's social, emotional, and physical development. Similarly, the best and most efficient route to physical health is through also addressing emotional, social, and c...

Background: Previous literature suggests that children with ASD experience difficulty on the Delayed Non-Matched to Sample task (DNMS). In the DNMS task, children are initially presented with one stimulus covering a well that contains a reward. After a time delay, they are presented with the initial stimulus paired with a novel stimulus. During thi...

Comment aider les enfants à réussir à l'école et, plus généralement, à développer leurs capacités intellectuelles ? Les résultats de travaux fondamentaux en psychologie et en neurosciences permettent de proposer des méthodes pédagogiques efficaces, bien qu'elles semblent parfois aller contre le bon sens.

This special section of Developmental Psychology contains articles on the interplay of biology and the environment, broadly defined, that have the potential to change or challenge how developmental psychologists think. Topics include how experience affects gene expression; how genes affect how the environment is experienced and what effect the envi...

It is proposed that the mind and brain often work at a gross level and only with fine tuning or inhibition act in a more differentiated manner, even when one might think the domains being issued the global command should be distinct. This applies to disparate findings in cognitive science and neuroscience in both children and adults. Thus, it is ea...

One major contribution of neuroscience to understanding cognitive development has been in demonstrating that biology is not destiny-that is, demonstrating the remarkable role of experience in shaping the mind, brain, and body. Only rarely has neuroscience provided wholly new insights into cognitive development, but often it has provided evidence of...

This paper examines interrelations between biological and social influences on the development of self-regulation in young children and considers implications of these interrelations for the promotion of self-regulation and positive adaptation to school. Emotional development and processes of emotion regulation are seen as influencing and being inf...

Dopamine in Prefrontal Cortex During Early Development in Humans Where is DL-PFC? Evidence that DL-PFC subserves Cognitive Abilities even during Infancy The Cognitive Abilities Subserved by DL-PFC and Required for Success on the A-not-B and Object Retrieval Tasks Evidence of Improvement in the Cognitive Abilities that depend on DL-PFC during Early...

Cognitive control skills important for success in school and life are amenable to improvement in at-risk preschoolers without costly interventions.

Patricia Goldman-Rakic played a groundbreaking role in investigating the cognitive functions subserved by dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the key role of dopamine in that. The work discussed here builds on that including: 1) Studies of children predicted to have lower levels of prefrontal dopamine but otherwise basically normal brains (children...

The possibilities for building and nourishing connections among the social, cultural, neuroscientific, biological, and cognitive sciences in the service of understanding children and their development are tremendously exciting. Crossing, and integrating across, disciplinary boundaries, especially those disciplines relating to biology/neuroscience,...

The age at which infants can demonstrate the ability to deduce abstract rules can be reduced by more than half, from 21 months to 9 months. The key is to introduce a physical connection between the items to be conceptually related. I argue here that making the same change in how items are presented might also help some preschoolers with learning de...

Executive function, also known as cognitive control or supervisory attention, is required whenever going "on automatic". Classes of situations in which executive functions are required include novel tasks and situations that require concentration, planning, problem solving, coordination, change, conscious choices among alternatives, or overriding a...

The classic Flanker effect is highly replicable but relatively small and fragile (i.e., very sensitive to stimulus characteristics). We hypothesized that the reason for that is because subjects can settle into concentrating on the central location. We therefore predicted that if a switching component were added, requiring subjects to sometimes focu...

Predictions concerning development, interrelations, and possible independence of working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility were tested in 325 participants (roughly 30 per age from 4 to 13 years and young adults; 50% female). All were tested on the same computerized battery, designed to manipulate memory and inhibition independently and...

The Stroop color-word task cannot be administered to children who are unable to read. However, our color-object Stroop task can. One hundred and sixty-eight children of 3½-6½ years (50% female; 24 children at each 6-month interval) were shown line drawings of familiar objects in a color that was congruent (e.g., an orange carrot), incongruent (e.g....

Greater continuity in cognition between children and adults may exist than is usually appreciated. It was thought that after 3 to 4 years of age, the problem in switching on the dimensional-change card-sort task disappears. We show here, however, that if speed is used as the dependent measure, the effect of the first dimension is evident even in ad...

Most studies of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have focused on the combined type and emphasized a core problem in response inhibition. It is proposed here that the core problem in the truly inattentive type of ADHD (not simply the subthreshold combined type) is in working memory. It is further proposed that laboratory measures, suc...

Fifty-seven children (53% female) at 3 ages (2 1/2, 3, and 3 1/2 years) were tested on the standard Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task with integrated stimuli (e.g., a red truck) and on a separated-dimensions version where colorless shapes were presented on a colored background (e.g., a black truck on a red background). Roughly twice as many...

To investigate the role of inhibitory control in preschoolers' ability to switch sets, 3 conditions of the Dimensional Change Card Sort task ( Zelazo, Reznick, & Pinon, 1995) were tested. In Condition B (novel response options, standard stimuli) action inhibition was reduced, but the need for attentional inhibition was maintained. In Condition C (n...

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is an evolving field that investigates the relations between neural and cognitive development. Lying at the intersection of diverse disciplines, work in this area promises to shed light on classic developmental questions, mechanisms subserving developmental change, diagnosis and treatment of developmental disord...

The catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene affects how long dopamine acts in the prefrontal cortex. The Methionine polymorphism, which results in a slower breakdown of prefrontal dopamine, is associated with better adult prefrontal cortex function. The authors investigated the relation between the COMT gene polymorphism and cognitive performance...

A candidate process for explaining the rapid vocabulary acquisition during the preschool years is “fast mapping,” children's ability to sketch partial maps of a word's meaning after brief exposure. The present study examines this process for learning multiple words, testing the hypothesis that children's attention to the information critical for qu...

To investigate why 3-year-olds have difficulty in switching sorting dimensions, children of 3 and 4 years were tested in one of four conditions on Zelazo's card sort task: standard, sleeve, label and face-up. In the standard condition, children were required to sort blue-truck and red-star cards under either a blue-star or red-truck model card, fir...

Two commentaries have raised interesting and important questions regarding our theory of attentional inertia. Happaney and Zelazo declare that children's ability to self-reflect, and thus formulate higher-order rules, explains good performance on the card sort task. Self-reflection and rule formulation are descriptive, but do they provide an explan...

Are spatial proximity (0.10-12.5 cm), temporal proximity (0-, 2-, and 5-s gaps), and/or perceived connectedness of stimulus and reward key to infants' ability to deduce an abstract nonmatching rule from reward feedback? In this investigation, 3 conditions of the delayed nonmatching to sample task were administered to infants 9, 12, and 15 months ol...

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) undergoes one of the longest periods of development of any brain region, taking over two decades to reach full maturity in humans. This chapter focuses on normal development, dividing it into the following epochs: 0-1 years, 1-3 years, 3-7 years, and 7 years through early adulthood. For each epoch, it summarizes some of...

The day-night task requires saying "night" to a picture of the sun and "day" to a picture of the moon. In this investigation of why young children fail at this task, systematic variations of the task were administered to 96 children, half 4 years old and half 4 1/2 years old. Training children on the strategy of chunking the 2 rules into I ("say th...