A wealth of studies have investigated numerical abilities in infants and in children aged 3 or above, but research on pre-counting toddlers is sparse. Here we devised a novel version of an imitation task that was previously used to assess spontaneous focusing on numerosity (i.e. the predisposition to grasp numerical properties of the environment)…

The visual context in which an object or face resides can provide useful top-down information for guiding attention orienting, object recognition, and visual search. Although infants have demonstrated sensitivity to covariation in spatial arrays, it is presently unclear whether they can use rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide attention…

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…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

Previous studies have documented that individual differences in fine and gross motor skills are associated with executive function (EF) skills. This study used an experimental design to test whether participating in cognitively challenging motor skills activities was causally related to improvements in motor skills and two key indicators of school…

Young children can quickly and intuitively represent the number of objects in a visual scene through the Approximate Number System (ANS). The precision of the ANS--indexed as the most difficult ratio of two numbers that children can reliably discriminate--is well known to improve with development: whereas infants require relatively large ratios to…

Several studies indicate that executive functions (EF), such as working memory (WM), inhibition or flexibility can be improved by training and that these training-related benefits in WM capacity generalize to reading and mathematical abilities. However, the results of these studies are inconsistent and most of them focused on WM training in…

Although there is substantial evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) predicts children's executive function (EF), the mechanisms underlying this association are poorly understood. This study tested the utility of two theories proposed to link SES to children's EF: the family stress model and the family investment model. Data came from the…

Presentation of two kinds of materials in working memory (visual and acoustic), with the requirement to attend to one or both modalities, poses an interesting case for working memory development because competing predictions can be formulated. In two experiments, we assessed such predictions with children 7-13 years old and adults. With…

The dominant view of children's memory is that it is slow to develop and is inferior to adults'. Here we pitted 4-year-old children against adults in a test of verbatim recall of verbal material. Parents read a novel rhyming verse (and an integrated word list) as their child's bedtime story on ten consecutive days. A group of young adults listened…

Behavioral and neuroscience research on boundary extension (false memory beyond the edges of a view of a scene) has provided new insights into the constructive nature of scene representation, and motivates questions about development. Early research with children (as young as 6-7 years) was consistent with boundary extension, but relied on an…

Executive function is foundational for cognitive development. Previous research has shown both gross motor skills and physical activity to be related to executive function. However, evidence for these relationships in the preschool years, as well as in low- and middle-income countries is lacking. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the…

Sleep spindles are related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities. However, they undergo drastic maturational changes during adolescence. Here we used a longitudinal approach (across 7 years) to explore whether developmental changes in sleep spindle density can explain individual differences in sleep-dependent…

Studies have shown that numerosity-based arithmetic training can promote arithmetic learning in typically developing children as well as children with developmental dyscalculia (DD), but the cognitive mechanism underlying this training effect remains unclear. The main aim of the current study was to examine the role of visual form perception in…

We tested 8- and 10-month-old infants' visual working memory (VWM) for object-location bindings--"what is where"--with a novel paradigm, Delayed Match Retrieval, that measured infants' anticipatory gaze responses (using a Tobii T120 eye tracker). In an inversion of Delayed-Match-to-Sample tasks and with inspiration from the game…