Sylvia Gattas

• DPhil Student at University of Oxford

The developmental period from infancy to early childhood is one of substantial change – in advancements in cognitive skills, such as early executive functions, but also in the maturation of the prefrontal and parietal cortices that parallel such advances. The current study aims to investigate the emergence and development of inhibitory control, a c...

Individual differences in executive functions are detectable in the first year of life and continue to develop throughout the preschool years. Psychological science suggests that executive function is malleable, with parents playing a crucial role as potential agents of change. However, the effectiveness of interventions aimed at teaching parents h...

The developmental period from infancy to early childhood is one of substantial change – in advancements in cognitive skills, such as early executive functions, but also in the maturation of the prefrontal and parietal cortices that parallel such advances. The current study aims to investigate the emergence and development of inhibitory control, a c...

Executive functions (EF) are crucial to regulating learning and are predictors of emerging mathematics. However, interventions that integrate to improve mathematics remain poorly understood. 193 four-year-olds (mean age = 3 years:11 months pre-intervention; 111 female, 69% White) were assessed 5 months apart, with 103 children randomized to an inte...

A vast body of work highlights executive functions (EFs) as robust correlates of mathematics achievement over the primary and preschool years. Yet, despite such correlational evidence, there is limited evidence that EF interventions yield improvements in early years mathematics. As intervention studies are a powerful tool to move beyond correlation...

Children’s cognitive development is increasingly put at risk due to ubiquitous environmental toxicants, threatening their physiological and cognitive health. Moreover, such environmental toxicants have further reached food and water resources, causing developmental delays which are profoundly unavoidable. This literature review studies how environm...

Math-anxious people consistently underperform in math. The most widely accepted explanation for why this underperformance occurs is that math-anxious people experience heightened anxiety when faced with math, and this in-the-moment anxiety interferes with performance. Surprisingly, this explanation has not been tested directly. Here, using both sel...

The current study focused on the collaboration between cognitive scientists and educators to co-develop and progressively refine the Orchestrating Numeracy and The Executive (“The ONE”) Programme, an evidence-based integrated Executive Functions and Mathematics intervention composed of professional development and play-based activities. This iterat...

The current study focused on the collaboration between cognitive scientists and educators to co-develop and progressively refine the Orchestrating Numeracy and The Executive (“The ONE”) Programme, an evidence-based integrated Executive Functions and Mathematics intervention composed of professional development and play-based activities. This iterat...

Math anxiety is widely considered a potential barrier to success in STEM. Current thinking holds that math anxiety is directly linked to avoidance of and underperformance in STEM domains. However, past evidence supporting these claims is limited in important ways. Perhaps most crucially, it is possible that math anxiety predicts STEM outcomes merel...

As online research has become more prevalent, researchers have been investigating the possibility of replicating techniques that go beyond measuring only simple behaviour. One such method could leverage the webcam of the participants’ device to collect information about eye gaze direction. Several packages have been developed for collecting such da...

Research on how people process numerical order carries implications for our theoretical understanding of what a number means and our practical understanding of the foundation upon which more sophisticated mathematics is built. Current thinking posits that ordinal processing of numbers is linked to repeated practice with the integer count list, but...