Research investigating pragmatic abilities in healthy aging suggests that both production and comprehension might be compromised; however, it is not clear how pragmatic abilities evolve in late adulthood, as well as when difficulties are more likely to arise. The aim of this study is to investigate the decline of pragmatic skills in aging, and to…

Recent research has highlighted the critical role in children's cognitive development of the metacognitive support parents give their children during everyday interactions. Our main goal was to examine whether parents made consistent use of metacognitive talk across different parent - child interaction contexts and to document the effect of this…

This study examined auditive and visual working memory and metacognitive knowledge in 92 gifted children (aged between eight and twelve), utilising a pre-test-training-post-test design, known as the cognitive training design. This approach was used to examine the working memory and metacognitive knowledge of gifted children concerning the…

This study investigated the development of divergent thinking (DT) in early childhood. We followed 107 4-year-olds for 1.5 years. Children's DT was assessed with the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) every 6 months, four times in total. Within the AUT, children were asked to generate unusual uses of common objects while explaining how they came up with…

This longitudinal study modeled children's complex executive function (EF) development using the Groton Maze Learning Task (GMLT). Using a cohort-sequential design, 147 children (61 males, 5.5-11 years) were recruited from six multicultural primary schools in Melbourne and Perth, Australia. Race/ethnicity data were not available. Children were…

The study of children's prospective memory has gained new momentum over the past 20 years and is now an active area of research in cognitive development. Yet, this resurgence has been accompanied by significant challenges that offer important lessons and insights for other areas of developmental science. In this article, I provide an overview and…

The aim of this study was to analyse whether specialised musical training influences auditory discrimination, working memory, learning strategies and academic performance. Sixty students (30 with at least four years of musical training and 30 without) of the same socioeconomic level were compared. Significant differences were found between…

Children's spatial mapping starts out particularly sensitive to 3D wall-like boundaries and develops over early childhood to flexibly include other boundary types. This study investigated whether spatial boundaries influence children's episodic memory, as in adults, and whether this effect is modulated by boundary type. Eighty-one Korean children…

The use of a verbal rehearsal strategy (repeating the items to be remembered to oneself in serial order) has been identified as a key factor in explaining working memory (WM) development. However, the debate remains open with regard to the age at which children are able to use it, and the actual benefits of using such a strategy. Numerous…

Mental rotation, a crucial aspect of spatial cognition, can be improved through repeated practice. However, the long-term effects of combining training with non-invasive brain stimulation and its neurophysiological correlates are not well understood. This study examined the lasting effects of a 10-day mental rotation training with high-definition…

Key areas of the episodic memory (EM) network demonstrate changing structure and volume during adolescence. EM is multifaceted and yet studies of EM thus far have largely examined single components, used different methods and have unsurprisingly yielded inconsistent results. The Treasure Hunt task is a single paradigm that allows parallel…

Caregiver executive functions (EFs) play an integral role in shaping cognitive development. Here, we investigated how caregiver EF abilities (86 caregivers; "mean age" = 33.4 years, SD = 4.5) was associated with visual working memory (VWM) in infants (86 infants females; mean age = 250.6 days, SD = 35.8). The BRIEF-A was used to assess…

We investigated whether selective discussion of autobiographical memory narratives would impact the quality of young people's recall of their nondiscussed memory narratives. Children (ages 8-9 years, n = 65) and adolescents (ages 13-15 years, n = 58) completed an adapted version of the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm for self-generated…

Memory for the temporal order of past events is a critical capacity; however, relatively little is known about its development and the processes that support it in early to middle childhood. The aim of this study was to examine children's memory for the temporal order of real-world events. Four-five-year-old (n = 36), 6-7-year-old (n = 45) and…

Ageing is associated with elevated pure-tone thresholds, accompanied by increased difficulties in understanding speech-in-noise. While amplification provides important, but insufficient support, auditory-cognitive training (ACT) might propose a solution. However, generalized effects have been scarce, highlighting the necessity of training designs…