Inequalities in access to important resources and opportunities between social groups persist throughout societies worldwide. Social psychological research has shown that adults often use meritocratic beliefs to justify the existence of such inequalities. Yet, the developmental origins of meritocratic beliefs have yet to be fully explored. This…

Children experience a variety of messages about racial-ethnic socialization from their parents, teachers, and other sources, who might not answer children's questions about race, or might explicitly promote the idea that race does not matter. However, how such messages affect children's reasoning about disparities, including whether children…

It is unknown how the brain supports reading development in individuals with reading disability (RD). In a cross-sectional study (i.e., children, adolescents, adults), we found an age-related shift in brain activation from posterior to anterior part of the left occipitotemporal (OT) area in typical readers, supporting orthographic specialization,…

Prior research has explored children's help-seeking tendencies in relation to the characteristics of help providers with a primary focus on the helper's competencies. In the current study, we propose that acknowledging a child's emotions without judgment, referred to as emotional validation, is another cue that guides children's help-seeking…

Research has shown that infants are curious and actively seek situations from which they can learn. For instance, a recent eye-tracking study demonstrates that babies tend to allocate their attention to stimuli that offer opportunities for learning new information. Interestingly, however, the degree to which attention is guided by information gain…

Sound symbolism refers to associations between language sounds and certain perceptual or semantic properties. One well-studied example is the maluma/takete effect, in which individuals tend to associate round-sounding nonwords like maluma with round shapes, and spiky-sounding nonwords like takete with spiky shapes. This phenomenon suggests that…