The forgotten militant and his enduring mission: Zing-Yang Kuo and his extraordinary years in behavioral neuroembryology (1929-1939).

Zing-Yang Kuo (1898-1970), hailed as China's behaviorist psychologist, earned "Out-Watsons Mr. Watson" in the international anti-instinct movement. His contributions to the field on behavioral neuroembryology (1929-1939) are often overlooked in comparison to his achievements in psychology. We retrieved the titles of all of Kuo's publications from 1929 to 1939 and examined those related to his research on the origins and development of embryonic behavioral ontogeny and the neural basis of embryonic behavior. Remarkably, Kuo concurrently focused on embryos during the same period as North American neuroembryologists. He maintained an independent stance in the debate over the sequence of behavioral ontogeny, represented by the embryonic neuroscientists Coghill and Windle, and critically pointed out limitations in research on both sides of the debate. Drawing from his experiments with chicken embryos, Kuo proposed the theory of behavioral epigenesis, which attempted to end the nature-nurture dichotomy and promote the transformation of the research path of behavioral embryology from elementary physiological anatomy toward a deep "comprehensive science." Kuo's achievements directly laid the foundation for the interdisciplinary field of developmental psychobiology, constructing a new conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of behavioral development and promoting the establishment and development of a new approach to epiphenotype epigenetics.

The Relation Between Attention and Memory.

The relation between attention and memory has long been deemed important for understanding cognition, and it was heavily researched even in the first experimental psychology laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt and his colleagues. Since then, the importance of the relation between attention and memory has been explored in myriad subdisciplines of psychology, and we incorporate a wide range of these diverse fields. Here, we examine some of the practical consequences of this relation and summarize work with various methodologies relating attention to memory in the fields of working memory, long-term memory, individual differences, life-span development, typical brain function, and neuropsychological conditions. We point out strengths and unanswered questions for our own embedded processes view of information processing, which is used to organize a large body of evidence. Last, we briefly consider the relation of the evidence to a range of other theoretical views before drawing conclusions about the state of the field.

Generalization of Skill for a Working Memory Recognition Procedure in Children: The Benefit of Starting with Easy Materials.

When children practice a new task, they need to learn both the task procedure and the materials tested. It is often unclear if improvements with practice reflect learning of the task procedure or familiarity with the materials. We sought to examine learning of the task procedure by switching from one set of materials to another in a working memory recognition task. We recruited 70 children (34 female, M = 11.27 years, SD = 0.62, ranging from 10.08 to 12.39) in the United States who were to remember sequences of orientations and of shapes for recognition immediately following the list. Half of the children began with orientation, an easier task, and the other half began with difficult-to-name shapes, a harder task. When children began with the easier task, the acquisition of the recognition task skill in the easy condition transferred to the more difficult task, optimizing the mean performance across tasks. Transfer was less potent when children began with the more difficult task. The results showed that sufficient practice is crucial to avoid poor initial performance, which might be important for the student's rate of progress and task engagement.

Proactive Personality and Academic Engagement: The Mediating Effects of Teacher-Student Relationships and Academic Self-Efficacy.

A proactive personality provides students with strong competitiveness in academic learning. However, previous research primarily focused on the effects of the big five facets, and less attention was paid to proactive personality which shows more incremental validity in learning. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between proactive personality and academic engagement. The sample consisted of 519 students (245 females, 274 males; M age = 10.20, SD = 0.891). The study used Mplus 7.0 software to establish structural equation models (SEM). The results showed a significant positive relationship between proactive personality and academic engagement. Teacher-student relationships and academic self-efficacy were found to fully mediate separately between proactive personality and academic engagement. Moreover, the serial mediator model indicated that proactive personality was sequentially related to academic engagement through teacher-student relationships and academic self-efficacy. The implications for learning and teaching are discussed.