The human capacity for rational decisions hinges on modal judgment: the discernment of what could, has to, or cannot happen. This ability was proposed to be a late outcome of human cognitive development, contingent on the mastery of linguistic structures. Here, we show that preschool-age children are capable of sophisticated forms of modal…

Working memory (WM) is a critical cognitive system that supports processing a variety of information. Remembering different types of objects may impose different levels of cognitive demands on WM performance. In the present study, we examined 205 children's WM in representing different types of content and its developmental trajectories in early…

Severe psychosocial deprivation in early childhood experienced by institutionally reared children changes the course of structural brain development. Evidence from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) has demonstrated a causal association of random assignment to high-quality foster care intervention in early childhood with remediation…

Children often say that possible events are impossible, and only gradually come to see these events as possible. For instance, they often deny that people could do unusual things, like own a pet peacock, or immoral things, like stealing or lying. These possibility denials are surprising. For instance, children have first-hand experience with the…

We introduce a novel method to test a classic idea in developmental science that children's attention to a stimulus is driven by how much they can learn from it. Preschoolers (4-6 years, M=4.6) watched a video where a distracting animation accompanied static, page-by-page illustrations of a storybook. The audio narration for each storybook page…

Executive control (EC) emerges in the first year of life, with the ability to inhibit prepotent responses (inhibitory control [IC]) and to flexibly readapt (cognitive flexibility [CF]) steadily improving. Simultaneously, electrophysiological brain activity undergoes profound reconfiguration, which has been linked to individual variability in EC.…

There are long-held concerns regarding the impact of screen media on children's cognitive development. In particular, fast pace and fantastical events have been theorized to deplete children's cognitive resources, leading to reductions in their attention and executive functions (EF). To date, however, empirical tests of short-term effects of media…

Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

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…

A long-standing question in developmental science is how the neurodevelopment of the brain influences cognitive functions. Here, we examined the developmental change of resting EEG power and its links to vocabulary acquisition in school-age children. We further explored what mechanisms may mediate the relation between brain rhythm maturation and…

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…

These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32).…

We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the…

The development of independent sitting changes everyday opportunities for learning and has cascading effects on cognitive and language development. Prior to independent sitting, infants experience the sitting position with physical support from caregivers. Why does supported sitting not provide the same input for learning that is experienced in…

Childcare services are widely used by families and thereby exert an important influence on many young children. Yet, little research has examined whether childcare may impact the development of child executive functioning (EF), one of the pillars of cognitive development in early childhood. Furthermore, despite persisting hypotheses that childcare…