There could be a direct effect of maternal mood on foetal brain development, which affects the behavioural development of the child.

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This paper presents a methodology designed to investigate the potential independence of memory and inhibition as component processes of executive function (EF) in young school age children. Two groups of 30 6-and 8-year-olds were tested on three EF tasks; a continuous performance test, a Stroop-like task, and a start/stop task. Each task had four conditions, which systematically combined two levels of memory load and two levels of inhibitory demand. This design enabled us to examine whether, within the range of memory and inhibitory loads used, the effects of memory and inhibitory demands on these tasks were additive and independent, or instead interacted with one another. Analyses of both errors and response times across the three tasks provided no positive evidence for the view that memory and inhibition are inter-dependent processes. The tasks proved sensitive to age, with the 8-year-olds generally outperforming the 6-year-olds. In addition, effects of the memory and inhibition manipulations were observed. However, there was little evidence that memory load and inhibitory demand interacted in the way that would be expected if these factors draw on a shared pool of common executive resources. Copyright # 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: executive function (EF); school age children; EF tasks; memory and inhibition; continuous performance task; stroop-like task; start/stop test Clinical evidence shows that people with damage to the pre-frontal cortex experience problems with a range of executive tasks involving planning, flexibility, organization and working memory (Shallice, 1998;Stuss and Benson, 1987). However the neural and cognitive processes which underpin performance in executive function (EF) tasks have yet to be fully specified (Rabbitt, 1997); and

Analogical reasoning has been shown to be effective in the process of solving Dunker's radiation problem. The spatial nature of the solution to this problem suggests that a visually represented analogue should be particularly effective. However, recent work seems to indicate that a visual analogue does not assist in solving the radiation problem. This paper reports a detailed experimental analysis of the effectiveness of visually represented analogues to the radiation problem. The results show that visual analogues can be effective if they represent the appropriate features of the problem-solution relationship. The paper also reports on the use of an appropriate visual representation within the problem as a facilitator of analogical reasoning. The results indicate that a visual representation within the problem can act as a facilitator of analogical reasoning, possibly by acting as a retrieval cue.