During human childhood, brain development and body growth compete for limited metabolic resources, resulting in a trade-off where energy allocated to brain development can decrease as body growth accelerates. This preregistered study explores the relationship between language skills, serving as a proxy for brain development, and body mass index at…

Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even "enhanced," social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high-adversity contexts (i.e. 'hidden talents'). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory…

Mathematical knowledge is constructed hierarchically from basic understanding of quantities and the symbols that denote them. Discrimination of numerical quantity in both symbolic and non-symbolic formats has been linked to mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, little is known of the extent to which overlap in quantity representations…

Cognitive control develops rapidly over the first decade of life, with one of the dominant changes being a transition from reliance on 'as-needed' control (reactive control) to a more planful, sustained form of control (proactive control). Although the emergence of proactive control is important for mature behavior, we know little about how this…

Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other's rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal…

Biologically embedded experiences alter developmental trajectories in ways that can influence health, learning, and/or behavior. These systematic differences in experiences may contribute to different biological outcomes as individuals grow and develop, including at the neural level. Previous studies of biologically embedded experiences on…

In this study (n = 1000, M[subscript age at K1entry] = 53.4 months, SD = 3.4; 53% females), we investigated the contributions of the family socioeconomic status (SES; maternal education and an income-related measure) and number and age of siblings to the development of children's math, reading, and working memory (WM) updating skills over the…

The benefits of active music participation and training for cognitive development have been evidenced in multiple studies, with this link leveraged in music therapy approaches with clinical populations. Although music, rhythm, and movement activities are widely integrated into children's play and early education, few studies have systematically…

This paper used a nationally representative sample of children from the United States to examine the extent to which physical activity and sports participation may promote growth in children's executive functions (EFs), attention, and social self-control over time. Using data from the ECLS-K:2011 (N = 18,174), findings indicated that regular…

We used two simple unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify differential trajectories of change in children who undergo intensive working memory (WM) training. We used self-organizing maps (SOMs)--a type of simple artificial neural network--to represent multivariate cognitive training data, and then tested whether the way tasks are…

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and…

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the…

A well-established literature demonstrates executive function (EF) deficits in obese children and adults relative to healthy weight comparisons. EF deficits in obesity are associated with overeating and impulsive consumption of high calorie foods leading to excess weight gain and to problems with metabolic regulation and low-grade inflammation…

Previous research shows that word segmentation is a language-specific skill. Here, we tested segmentation of bi-syllabic words in two languages (French; English) within the same infants in a single test session. In Experiment 1, monolingual 8-month-olds (French; English) segmented bi-syllabic words in their native language, but not in an…

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex.…