The current study examined relations between distinct aspects of moral functioning, and their cognitive and emotional correlates, in preschool age children. Participants were 171 typically developing 3- to 6-year-olds. Each child completed several tasks, including (a) moral tasks assessing both performance of various moral actions and evaluations…

Two experiments investigated the development of metacognitive monitoring and control, and conditions under which children engage these processes. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N = 30) and 7-year-olds (N = 30), unlike adults (N = 30), showed little evidence of either monitoring or control. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds (N = 90) were given…

Emotion regulation predicts positive academic outcomes like learning, but little is known about "why". Effective emotion regulation likely promotes learning by broadening the scope of what may be attended to after an emotional event. One hundred twenty-six 6- to 13-year-olds' (54% boys) regulation of sadness was examined for changes in…

Researchers examined whether contingent experience using a touch screen increased toddlers' ability to learn a word from video. One hundred and sixteen children (24-36 months) watched an on-screen actress label an object: (a) without interacting, (b) with instructions to touch "anywhere" on the screen, or (c) with instructions to touch a…

This study examined executive control in sixty-two 5-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual using behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. All children performed equivalently on simple response inhibition (gift delay), but bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on interference suppression and complex response…

Immediate and lasting effects of music or second-language training were examined in early childhood using event-related potentials. Event-related potentials were recorded for French vowels and musical notes in a passive oddball paradigm in thirty-six 4- to 6-year-old children who received either French or music training. Following training, both…

This study investigated the spatial analysis of tactile hierarchical patterns in 110 early-blind children aged 6-8 to 16-18 years, as compared to 90 blindfolded sighted children, in a naming and haptic drawing task. The results revealed that regardless of visual status, young children predominantly produced local responses in both tasks, whereas…

The link between emotion regulation and academic achievement is well documented. Less is known about specific emotion regulation strategies that promote learning. Six- to 13-year-olds ("N" = 126) viewed a sad film and were instructed to reappraise the importance, reappraise the outcome, or ruminate about the sad events; another group…

Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when…

Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the…

Individual differences in affective decision making were examined by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while 74 typically developing 8-year-olds (38 boys, 36 girls) completed a 4-choice gambling task (Hungry Donkey Task; E. A. Crone & M. W. van der Molen, 2004). ERP results indicated: (a) a robust P300 component in response to feedback…

There is converging evidence for the presence of a fast subcortical face-processing route that operates on global face characteristics in the mature brain. Until now, little has been known about the development of such a route, which is surprising given suggestions that this fast subcortical face-processing route might be affected in…

Emotion recognition was investigated in typically developing individuals and individuals with autism. Experiment 1 tested children (5-7 years, n = 37) with brief video displays of facial expressions that varied in subtlety. Children with autism performed worse than the control children. In Experiment 2, 3 age groups (8-12 years, n = 49; 13-17…

The relationship between neonatal visual information-processing and the burst-pause pattern of nonnutritive sucking was explored. (JMB)

Regulatory aspects of development can best be understood by research that conceptualizes relations between cognition and emotion. The neural mechanisms associated with regulatory processes may be the same as those associated with higher order cognitive processes. Thus, from a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective, emotion and cognition…