Some philosophers argue that reflection is key to rational thinking. By tying reflective thinking to language, they struggle to account for minimally verbal infants and exclude nonhuman animals. This study assessed processing of undermining defeaters--a basic form of reflective thinking--in 36 two-year-old British children (13 female; M[subscript…

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…

Need for cognition (NFC) reflects the tendency to enjoy and engage in cognitive challenges. This study examines the relations between NFC and academic interest among 922 German secondary school students (academic track) assessed four times in Grades 5-7 (initial age M = 10.63, SD = 0.55; 41% female; 90% first language German) in mathematics,…

When making moral judgments of past actions, adults often think counterfactually about what could have been done differently. Considerable evidence suggests that counterfactual thinking emerges around age 6, but it remains unknown how this development influences children's moral judgments. Across two studies, Australian children aged 4-9 (N = 236,…

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016-2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided…

In a cross-sectional study, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old-children and adults (N = 144, 86 females, predominantly White U.K. sample of lower-middle to middle-class background) were interviewed about their experiences of involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and semantic mind-pops that come to mind unintentionally. Although some age differences…

Using cognitive diagnostic modeling (CDM), this study identified subtypes of mathematics learning disability (MLD) based on children's numerical skills and examined the language and spatial precursors of these subtypes. Participants were 99 MLD children and 420 low achievers identified from 1839 Finnish children (966 boys) who were followed from…

Visual working memory (WM) plays a pivotal role in integrating fragments into meaningful units, but no study has addressed how visual WM integration takes place in children. The current study examined whether WM integration emerges once preschoolers master Gestalt cue and can retain two representations in WM (automatic integration hypothesis), or…

This cross-sectional study explored the relationship between 24-hour movement behaviors and executive function (EF) in preschool children. A total of 426 Han Chinese preschoolers (231 males; 3.8 ± 0.6 years old) from Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, China were selected from October 2021 to December 2021. Accelerometers were used to measure physical…

Neural specialization for print can be indexed by the left-lateralized N1 response as a tuning gradient to visual words, indicated by sensitivity (character vs. visual control) and selectivity (character vs. character-like stimuli). Forty-five Chinese children (20 boys) were recorded with EEG twice with a 2-year interval during a character…

The cognitive functioning of children who experience intimate partner violence (IPV) has received less attention than their emotional-behavioral outcomes. Drawing upon data from 615 (48.4% female) 10-year-old Australian-born children and their mothers (9.6% of mothers born in non-English speaking countries) participating in a community-based…

This 5-year longitudinal study investigated advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development in 161 German 5- to 10-year-olds (89 females, 72 males). Core aspects of AToM developed nonlinearly, with children reaching a milestone at the age of 7 years, around when they attained the conceptual insight that mental states can be recursive. In late…

Adults implicitly judge people from certain social backgrounds as more "American" than others. This study tests the development of children's reasoning about nationality and social categories. Children across cultures (White and Korean American children in the United States, Korean children in South Korea) judged the nationality of…

This study trained children to master logical fallacies and examined how learning is related to processing efficiency and fluid intelligence (gf). A total of one hundred and eighty 8- and 11-year-old children living in Cyprus were allocated to a control, a limited (LI), and a full instruction (FI) group. The LI group learned the notion of logical…

A large-scale ("N" = 552) controlled multivariate prospective 14-year longitudinal study of a developmental cascade embedded in a developmental system showed that information-processing efficiency in infancy (4 months), general mental development in toddlerhood (18 months), behavior difficulties in early childhood (36 months),…