From the earliest moments in their lives, infants begin to build memories about their past and accumulate knowledge about the world. In this article, we focus on the distinction between memory for "specific" events and memory for "general" information, and the ongoing debate about which type of memory provides the foundation…

There are long-held concerns regarding the impact of screen media on children's cognitive development. In particular, fast pace and fantastical events have been theorized to deplete children's cognitive resources, leading to reductions in their attention and executive functions (EF). To date, however, empirical tests of short-term effects of media…

We investigated the effect of cognitive training of executive functions on children's cognitive outcomes. To address this issue, a systematic meta-analysis of published research articles on cognitive training interventions was performed considering children's age, training duration, -procedure, and -technology in moderator analyses. The results (N…

This article offers insights into trends found in 74 empirical studies on teaching and learning a foreign language (FL) in pre-primary schools in 25 countries. The emerging picture is like that of primary-school programs: most are implemented in English, mostly owing to parents' enthusiasm rather than evidence on long term FL benefits. Researchers…

The trend toward the digitalization of all areas of human activity has had a significant impact on education. Today, more than ever, there is a lot of discussion about developing the students' specific skills to adapt to future changes. In this context, research investigating practices at the primary school level is constantly expanding, out of…

This meta-analysis examined the associations between teachers' language practices and children's language development from preschool to third grade. We screened 14,852 articles. A total of 119 articles from 104 distinct studies were analyzed, comprising 415 effect sizes across 13,572 teachers and 112,533 child participants. The result of the…

Developmental psychology focuses on how psychological constructs change with age. In cognitive development research, however, the specifics of this emergence is often underspecified. Researchers often provisionally assume linear growth by including chronological age as a predictor in regression models. In this work, we aim to evaluate this…

Introduction: Fundamental movement skills (FMS) are categorized into three groups (stability, locomotion, and object control) and are crucial for enabling the practice of physical activity in children with physical disabilities. Their development is influenced by the specific nature of each child's disability. FMS can be evaluated by process-…

As they develop into mature speakers of their native language, infants must not only learn words but also the sounds that make up those words. To do so, they must strike a balance between accepting speaker-dependent variation (e.g., mood, voice, accent) but appropriately rejecting variation when it (potentially) changes a word's meaning (e.g., cat…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition affecting information processing across domains. The current meta-analysis investigated whether slower processing speed is associated with the ASD neurocognitive profile and whether findings hold across different time-based tasks and stimuli (social vs. nonsocial; linguistic…

Emotional self-awareness is increasingly suggested to be an area of difficulty in autism that may predict socioemotional outcomes for this population. However, whether emotional self-awareness is consistently diminished in autism across age and methodology remains unclear. We systematically reviewed 47 papers measuring emotional self-awareness in…

Background: Within the same school class, it is usual to find children who differ in age by almost a full calendar year. Although associations between being relatively young and poor academic outcomes are well documented, and relatively consistent, the associations between being relatively young and psychosocial outcomes are less clearly…

Understanding distinctions between morality and conventions is an important milestone in children's moral development. The current meta-analysis integrated decades of social domain theory research (Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1983) on moral and conventional judgments from early to middle childhood. We examined 95 effect sizes from 18 studies (2,707…

Children's learning and cognitive development have a distinct receptivity to the circumstances of childhood. However, not all children have equal opportunities and learning inequities continue to be influenced by the social and economic circumstances of childhood. Examining factors within the environments that children are growing up in, and the…

Humans accumulate knowledge throughout their entire lives. In what ways does this accumulation of knowledge influence learning of new information? Are there age-related differences in the way prior knowledge is leveraged for remembering new information? We review studies that have investigated these questions, focusing on those that have used the…