Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

Although exploratory play is considered a hallmark of cognitive development and learning, relatively few studies have been able to quantitatively characterize the shifts that may occur in children's approach to exploration. One reason for this gap is due to challenges coding and analyzing children's exploratory play behavior. In our paper, we…

Despite numerous critiques of the pioneering works of developmental child psychology, these key ideas continue to resonate within the field of ECEC (early childhood education and care). This article seeks to re-animate the critique through a closer look at two current tendencies within the Nordic countries: a growing and increasingly strict age…

Defining developmental progressions can be an important step in identifying developmental precursors and mechanisms of change, within and across areas of reasoning. In one exploratory study, we examine whether the development of children's thinking about ownership follows a systematic progression wherein some components emerge reliably before…

Humans accumulate knowledge throughout their entire lives. In what ways does this accumulation of knowledge influence learning of new information? Are there age-related differences in the way prior knowledge is leveraged for remembering new information? We review studies that have investigated these questions, focusing on those that have used the…

The interaction between a mother and child stands as one of the most profound and intricate human connections, weaving a rich tapestry of behavioral and emotional bonds during the formative years. Although mother-child interactions have received substantial attention in the developmental science literature, few studies have tapped into the…

Purpose: Parent report was compared to judgments made by a trained researcher to determine the utility of the Vocal Development Landmarks Interview (VDLI) for monitoring development of vocal behaviors in very young children. Method: Parents of 40 typically developing children, ages 6-21 months, provided full-day naturalistic audio recordings of…

This study focused on the importance of developmental assessment in early childhood and the approaches used by teachers in this process. This study examined how teachers conduct assessment processes based on individual differences and child-centered approaches. This study used a mixed-method design and was conducted with 181 preschool teachers in…

The architecture of sleep undergoes distinct changes during childhood and early adolescence. Slow wave sleep is involved in memory processing and may support active consolidation of newly encoded representations to support the formation of abstracted "gist" memories. Here, we examined sleep and overnight memory formation in German school…

Our ability to shift from current to alternative (e.g., past and future) perspectives (i.e., "self-projection") plays a fundamental role in accurate decision-making. We investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' ability to shift perspective to reason about their future and past preferences. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), children were presented…

The construct of this inquiry had been drawn from the lensing of developmental progression of children in the College of Human Ecology Nursery Development Center. This work sought at presenting an index showing how children perform the basic tasks expected of them in terms of motor, self-care, and play skills using the development checklist.…

Abstract How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources--for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples…

Girls, more than boys, experience a decrease in the severity of autism symptoms during childhood. It is unclear, however, which specific autistic behaviors change more for girls than for boys. Trajectories of autism symptoms were evaluated using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-calibrated severity scores (ADOS-CSS). Change in the…

Despite earlier claims that language abilities are intact in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), many studies have shown that language development is often delayed and atypical, that is, it develops in line with different cognitive abilities compared to typically developing populations. It is unclear, however, whether general cognitive…

Emotion words allow us to identify, describe and regulate our emotional states. Emotion vocabulary grows through childhood, but little research has considered emotion words in the context of children's written language. To address this gap, we used a cross-corpus developmental approach to chart the emergence of emotion words in children's reading…