Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

Overparenting--taking over and completing developmentally appropriate tasks for children--is pervasive and hurts children's motivation. Can overparenting in early childhood be reduced by simply framing tasks as learning opportunities? In Study 1 (N = 77; 62% female; 74% White; collected 4/2022), US parents of 4-to-5-year-olds reported taking over…

Although exploratory play is considered a hallmark of cognitive development and learning, relatively few studies have been able to quantitatively characterize the shifts that may occur in children's approach to exploration. One reason for this gap is due to challenges coding and analyzing children's exploratory play behavior. In our paper, we…

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…