Adjusting practice to different goals and characteristics is key to learning, but its development remains unclear. Across 2 preregistered experiments, 190 4-to-8-year-olds (106 female; mostly White; data collection: December 2021-September 2022) and 31 adults played an easy and a difficult game, then chose one to practice before a test on either…

Across two studies, children ages 6-9 (N = 160, 82 boys, 78 girls; 75% White, 91% non-Hispanic) rated an inaccurate expert's knowledge and provided explanations for the expert's inaccurate statements. In Study 1, children's knowledge ratings decreased as he provided more inaccurate information. Ratings were predicted by age (i.e., older children…

Optimal integration of positive and negative outcomes during learning varies depending on an environment's reward statistics. The present study investigated the extent to which children, adolescents, and adults (N = 142 8-25 year-olds, 55% female, 42% White, 31% Asian, 17% mixed race, and 8% Black; data collected in 2021) adapt their weighting of…

This study took a novel approach to understanding the role of language in spatial development by combining approaches from spatial language and gesture research. It analyzed forty-three 4.5- to 6-year-old's speech and gesture production during explanations of reasoning behind performance on Spatial Analogies and Children's Mental Transformation…

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to…

Group membership is a strong driver of everyday life in humans, influencing similarity judgments, trust choices, and learning processes. However, its ontogenetic development remains to be understood. This study investigated how group membership, age, sex, and identification with a team influenced 39- to 60-month-old children (N = 94) in a series…

Two experiments were designed to investigate the developmental trajectory of children's probability approximation abilities. In Experiment 1, results revealed 6- and 7-year-old children's (N = 48) probability judgments improve with age and become more accurate as the distance between two ratios increases. Experiment 2 replicated these findings…

The impact of social group information on the learning and socializing preferences of Hong Kong Chinese children were examined. Specifically, the degree to which variability in racial out-group exposure affects children's use of race to make decisions about unfamiliar individuals (Chinese, White, Southeast Asian) was investigated. Participants…

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 265) responded to eight scenarios presented on an eye tracker. Each trial involved a character who encounters a perpetrator who had previously enacted positive (P), negative (N), or both types of actions toward him or her in varying sequences (NN, PP, PN, and NP). Participants predicted the character's…

Adolescence is characterized as a period of social reorientation toward peer relationships, entailing the emergence of sophisticated social abilities. Two studies (Study 1: N = 42, ages 13-17; Study 2: N = 81, ages 13-16) investigated age group differences in the impact of relationship reciprocation within school-based social networks on an…

Longitudinal patterns in parents' reports of youth decision-making autonomy from ages 9 to 20 were examined in a study of 201 European American families with 2 offspring. Multilevel modeling analyses revealed that decision-making autonomy increased gradually across middle childhood and adolescence before rising sharply in late adolescence. Social…

Inhibitory control and incentive processes underlie decision making, yet few studies have explicitly examined their interaction across development. Here, the effects of potential rewards and losses on inhibitory control in 64 adolescents (13- to 17-year-olds) and 42 young adults (18- to 29-year-olds) were examined using an incentivized antisaccade…

This research applied social domain theory to illuminate reasoning about the perceived legitimacy and limits of group decision making (majority rule) among adolescents from urban and rural China (N = 160). Study 1 revealed that adolescents from both urban and rural China judged group decision making as acceptable for both social conventional and…

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children's (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity.…

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…