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Peer reviewed
Direct linkMarley B. Forbes; Riley N. Sims; Melanie Killen – Developmental Science, 2026
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…
Descriptors: Social Psychology, Young Children, Young Adults, Evaluative Thinking
Danielle Harris; Ilyse Resnick; Tracy Logan; Tom Lowrie – Developmental Science, 2025
There are contentious and persistent gender differences reported in some measures of spatial skills, particularly mental rotation and, to a lesser extent, perspective-taking, which may have an impact on mathematics success. Furthermore, pathways between spatial skills and mathematics may be mediated by other cognitive factors, such as fluid…
Descriptors: Spatial Ability, Mathematics Education, Mathematics Achievement, Sex Role
Brenda C. Straka; Adam Stanaland; Sarah E. Gaither – Developmental Science, 2025
As young as 3 years old, children rely on a mutual intentionality framework to confer group membership--that is, agreement between a joiner ("I want to be in your group") and group ("We want you to be in our group"). Here, we tested whether children apply this cognitive framework in the context of identity-based groups,…
Descriptors: Self Concept, Group Membership, Gender Differences, Race
Ashley E. Hinten; Damian Scarf; Kana Imuta – Developmental Science, 2025
There are long-held concerns regarding the impact of screen media on children's cognitive development. In particular, fast pace and fantastical events have been theorized to deplete children's cognitive resources, leading to reductions in their attention and executive functions (EF). To date, however, empirical tests of short-term effects of media…
Descriptors: Computer Use, Mass Media Effects, Child Development, Cognitive Development
Enge, Alexander; Kapoor, Shreya; Kieslinger, Anne-Sophie; Skeide, Michael A. – Developmental Science, 2023
Mental rotation, the cognitive process of moving an object in mind to predict how it looks in a new orientation, is coupled to intelligence, learning, and educational achievement. On average, adolescent and adult males solve mental rotation tasks slightly better (i.e., faster and/or more accurate) than females. When such behavioral differences…
Descriptors: Meta Analysis, Cognitive Processes, Spatial Ability, Age Differences
Marianna Y. Zhang; John Nicky Sullivan; Sachin Allums; Ellen M. Markman – Developmental Science, 2026
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…
Descriptors: Children, Childrens Attitudes, Abstract Reasoning, Social Differences
Xiaohui Yan; Shilin Xu; Guoyan Feng; Fan Cao – Developmental Science, 2026
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,…
Descriptors: Reading Difficulties, Children, Adolescents, Adults
Wang, Yang; Qian, Miao; Nabbijohn, A. Natisha; Wen, Fangfang; Fu, Genyue; Zuo, Bin; VanderLaan, Doug P. – Developmental Science, 2022
Current understanding of how culture relates to the development of children's gender-related peer preferences is limited. To investigate the role of societal acceptance of gender nonconformity, this study compared children from China and Thailand. Unlike China and other cultures where the conceptualization of gender as binary is broadly accepted,…
Descriptors: Cultural Differences, Preferences, Gender Differences, Child Development
Minji Kim; Jeewon Jeon; Gerardo Ramirez; Daeun Park – Developmental Science, 2026
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…
Descriptors: Young Children, Help Seeking, Psychological Patterns, Interpersonal Relationship
Christine Coughlin; Athula Pudhiyidath; Hannah E. Roome; Nicole L. Varga; Kim V. Nguyen; Alison R. Preston – Developmental Science, 2024
Adults remember items with shared contexts as occurring closer in time to one another than those associated with different contexts, even when their objective temporal distance is fixed. Such temporal memory biases are thought to reflect within-event integration and between-event differentiation processes that organize events according to their…
Descriptors: Memory, Children, Adults, Age Differences
Ann Folker; Christina Bertrand; Yelim Hong; Laurence Steinberg; Natasha Duell; Lei Chang; Laura Di Giunta; Kenneth A. Dodge; Sevtap Gurdal; Daranee Junla; Jennifer E. Lansford; Paul Oburu; Concetta Pastorelli; Ann T. Skinner; Emma Sorbring; Marc H. Bornstein; Liliana Maria Uribe Tirado; Saengduean Yotanyamaneewong; Liane Peña Alampay; Suha M. Al-Hassan; Dario Bacchini; Kirby Deater-Deckard – Developmental Science, 2025
Executive functioning (EF) is an important developing self-regulatory process that has implications for academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Most work in EF has focused on childhood, and less has examined the development of EF throughout adolescence and into emerging adulthood. The present study assessed longitudinal trajectories of EF from…
Descriptors: Executive Function, Adolescents, Young Adults, Age Differences
Forsberg, Alicia; Guitard, Dominic; Adams, Eryn J.; Pattanakul, Duangporn; Cowan, Nelson – Developmental Science, 2022
We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6-13-years old) and 40 young adults (18-24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes.…
Descriptors: Long Term Memory, Short Term Memory, Individual Differences, Age Differences
Amrita Bains; Annaliese Barber; Tau Nell; Pablo Ripollés; Saloni Krishnan – Developmental Science, 2024
Relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words. In adults, recent experiments have shown that intrinsic reward signals accompany successful word learning from context. In addition, the experience of reward facilitated long-term memory for words. In adolescence, developmental changes are seen in reward and motivation…
Descriptors: Vocabulary Development, Children, Adolescents, Motivation
Cristina-Ioana Galusca; Anna Eve Helmlinger; Elodie Barat; Olivier Pascalis; Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst – Developmental Science, 2025
Children's social preferences are influenced by the relative status of other individuals, but also by their social identity and the degree to which those individuals are like them. Previous studies have investigated these aspects separately and showed that in some circumstances children prefer high-status individuals and own-gender individuals.…
Descriptors: Preferences, Success, Gender Differences, Gender Bias
Katherine A. Grisanzio; Patrick Mair; Leah H. Somerville – Developmental Science, 2025
While day-to-day negative affect normatively rises across adolescence, emotional experiences also stratify, or diverge, across individuals. Moreover, negative affect is not a unitary construct but comprises distinct feeling states (e.g., sadness, anger, anxiety), each characterized by distinct age-related trends. Yet, most developmental research…
Descriptors: Affective Behavior, Adolescents, Children, Psychological Patterns
