The interaction of visual exploration and auditory processing is central to early cognitive development, supporting object discrimination, categorization, and word learning. Research has shown visual-auditory interactions to be complex, created from multiple processes and changing over multiple timescales. To better understand these interactions,…

Preterm birth poses a major public health challenge, with significant and heterogeneous developmental impacts. Latent profile analysis was applied to the National Institutes of Health Toolbox performance of 1891 healthy prematurely born children from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study (970 boys, 921 girls; 10.00 ± 0.61 years;…

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the significance of early childhood education and care (ECEC) for children's development. We investigated the impact of attendance at ECEC programs following a closure period due to the pandemic. We used linear regression with a lagged dependent variable to examine assessments of children's cognitive and receptive…

The account that word learning starts in earnest during the second year of life, when infants have mastered the disambiguation skills, has recently been challenged by evidence that infants during the first year already know many common words. The preliminary ability to rapidly map and disambiguate linguistic labels was tested in Italian-speaking…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

This study examined the development of emotion understanding. Children (N = 296, 157 boys, 139 girls) and parents (67% White, 8% Black, 15% Hispanic, 2% Asian American, 6% Biracial, 2% "Other") recruited from Denver, Colorado were observed annually for four years starting in 2019 (beginning M[subscript age] = 2.44 years, SD = 0.26)…

During word learning moments, toddlers experience labels and objects in particular environments. Do toddlers learn words better when the physical environment creates contrasts between objects with different labels? Thirty-six 21- to 24-month-olds (92% White, 22 female, data collected 8/21-4/22) learned novel words for novel objects presented using…

Most cognitive training programs are adaptive, despite limited direct evidence that this maximizes children's outcomes. This randomized controlled trial evaluated working memory training with difficulty of activities presented using adaptive, self-select, or stepwise compared with an active control. At baseline, immediately, and 6-months…

Four-month-old infants extract ordinal information in number-based and size-based visual sequences, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Here the ontogenetic origins of ordinal processing were investigated between 2018 and 2022 by testing newborns' discrimination of reversal in numerosity (Experiment 1, N = 22 White, 11…

Developmental science has increasingly scrutinized how environmental hazards influence child outcomes, but few studies examine how contaminants affect disparities in early skill formation. Linking research on environmental inequality and early childhood development, this study assessed whether differences in exposure to neurotoxic lead explain…

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

Empirical findings on the associations of positive and dysfunctional parent--child relationship (PPCR/DPCR) characteristics with child shame, adaptive guilt, and maladaptive guilt were synthesized in six meta-analyses. The 65 included samples yielded 633 effect sizes (N[subscript total] = 19,144; M[subscript age] = 15.24 years; 59.0% female; 67.7%…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

Linking classroom quality to separate domains of child development might neglect the transactional interactions across developmental domains. This research utilized latent profiles across academic and social-emotional development to explore which aspects of classroom quality can predict children's profiles at the classroom level. Data were drawn…

In a series of meta-analyses, paternal sensitivity was associated with children's (age range: 7 months-9 years) overall cognitive functioning (N = 3,193; k = 23; r = 0.19), including language skills (k = 9; r = 0.21), cognitive ability (k = 9; r = 0.18), and executive function (k = 8; r = 0.19). Paternal sensitivity was not associated with…