Intelligence (IQ) scores are used in educational and vocational planning for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) yet little is known about the stability of IQ throughout development. We examined longitudinal age-related IQ stability in 119 individuals with ASD (3-36 years of age at first visit) and 128 typically developing controls.…

Adults can easily learn and access multiple versions of the same motor skill adapted for different conditions (e.g., walking in water, sand, snow). Following even a single session of adaptation, adults exhibit clear day-to-day retention and faster re-learning of the adapted pattern. Here, we studied the retention and re-learning of an adapted…

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…

This research investigated whether episodic memory development can be explained by improvements in relational binding processes, involved in forming novel associations between events and the context in which they occurred. Memory for item-space, item-time, and item-item relations was assessed in an ethnically diverse sample of 151 children aged…

Growing up in a high family risk (HFR) environment is accompanied by difficulties in executive functions (EFs) and interpersonal skills (IS) that may persist into adulthood. Because preadolescence is a critical period, this study will assess a multicomponent mediational intervention program, to determine the possibility of improving these skills.…

Previous research has suggested that fluency does not influence memory decisions until ages 7-8. In two experiments (n = 96 and n = 64, respectively), children, aged 4, 6, and 8 years (Experiments 1 and 2), and adults (Experiment 2) studied a list of pictures. Participants completed a recognition test during which each study item was preceded by a…

Conventional implicatures are omnipresent in daily life communication but experimental research on this topic is sparse, especially research with children. The aim of this study was to investigate if eight- to twelve-year-old children spontaneously make the conventional implicature induced by "but," "so," and…

We examined children's sleep at age 9 as a predictor of developmental trajectories of cognitive performance from ages 9 to 11 years. The effects of sleep on cognition are not uniform and thus we tested race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), and sex as moderators of these associations. At the first assessment, 282 children aged 9.44 years (52%…

Age-related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross-sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½-year longitudinal study of 277 6-…

The present study examined the developmental change in number and length acuities and their respective relationship with achievement in various domains of mathematics in second vs. fourth graders. Length acuity was measured with a comparison task, in which participants were asked to choose the longer between a pair of lines. Number acuity was…

Navigational and reaching spaces are known to involve different cognitive strategies and brain networks, whose development in humans is still debated. In fact, high-level spatial processing, including allocentric location encoding, is already available to very young children, but navigational strategies are not mature until late childhood. The…

The extensive empirical research inspired by Piaget and Vygotsky's theories of make-believe play has been criticised for restricting data to Western, urban, middle-class children. We seek to redress this bias by researching the traditional black South African Pedi children's game Masekitlana. Our data relies on embodied memories enacted by Mapelo…

Background: The purpose of the current cross-sectional study was to examine the developmental progression in working memory (WM) between the ages of 9 and 16 years in a large sample of children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities (MBID). Baddeley's influential WM model was used as a theoretical framework. Furthermore, the…

The abilities of past and future episodic thinking develop hand in hand across the preschool years and are intimately connected in adults. Little is known, however, about the development of episodic thinking in middle childhood and how it is influenced by sociocultural factors. In the present study, one hundred sixty-seven 7- to 10-year-old…

Working memory (WM) as the ability to temporarily maintain and manipulate various kinds of information is known to be affected by proactive interference (PI) from previously relevant contents, but studies on developmental changes in the susceptibility to PI are scarce. In the present study, we investigated life span development of item-specific…