Empowering the mind. Approaches, procedures, and techniques to improve skills

Improving humans’ skills is a task which psychologists are often requested to address. The question is: How can the enhancement of capacities be reached? Experimental investigations can suggest some insights about the most productive ways to foster the development competences. The aim of this book is to provide reader with some instances of how basic research can inspire interventions. The attempt is to present a wide and diversified set of examples. The skills which are taken into accounts concern comprehension, memory, reasoning, problem solving, creativity, and motor behavior. Settings implementation of such skills which are considered are education, school instruction, sport, professional training, and rehabilitation. People possibly benefiting from interventions based on the findings of the experiments reported here range from kindergarten children to elder adults and are both typically and atypically developing, healthy and pathological individuals.