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FIGURAL INTERSECTION TASK: DATA FROM RUSSIAN CHILDREN
Scholastic performance is related to cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities improve significantly during childhood and adolescence (Arsalidou, & Im-Bolter, 2017). One way to measure cognitive competence is by assessing the amount of information that children can hold and manipulate in mind, which we refer to as mental-attentional capacity. Within the theory of constructive operators (Pascual-Leone, 1970) mental-attention represents a domain general resource that enables problem solving and serves as the maturational component of working memory (Arsalidou et al., 2010). According to Pascual-Leone & Baillargeon (1994), the capacity of mental attention (M-operator) is limited at every developmental stage by the quantity of separate “chunks” of information, which a child can keep and operate in its own mind simultaneously or the number of schemes that can be picked from one’s repertoire and activated by M-operator all at one time using “mental effort”.