This study was an attempt to integrate cognitive development (i.e., cognitive control) and emotional development (i.e., emotion regulation) in the first years of life. The construct of temperament was used to unify cognition and emotion because of its focus on attentional and regulatory behaviors. Children were seen at 8 months and 4 1/2-years of…

Using older adults and dual-task interference, we examined performance on two social reasoning tasks: theory of mind (ToM) tasks and versions of the deontic selection task involving social contracts and hazardous conditions. In line with performance accounts of social reasoning (Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004), evidence from both aging and the…

A longitudinal study and a training study were conducted to show that simply referring to others facilitated theory of mind (ToM) development in Chinese children. In Study 1, 3- to 4-year-old Chinese children (N = 52) were tested on ToM and autobiographical memory (AM). One year later, in the group of children who initially failed the false belief…

Two studies investigated the relationship between learning names and learning concepts in preschool children. More specifically, we focused on the relationship between learning the names and learning the intended functions of artifacts, given that the intended function of an artifact is generally thought to constitute core conceptual information…

Two studies, an experimental category learning task and a computational simulation, examined how sequencing training instances to maximize comparison and memory affects category learning. In Study 1, 2-year-old children learned color categories with three training conditions that varied in how categories were distributed throughout training and…

Used path analysis in two experiments to examine possibility that age difference in infants' long-term retention were artifacts of correlated differences in learning rates or learning opportunities. Found that developmental declines in forgetting rates between 12 and 18 months were independent of developmental differences in learning. Age…

Four experiments with children aged 5 through 12 tested the relationship between short-term memory (STM) and processing capacity. The results suggest that effects obtained with STM span do not provide clear indications of overall working memory development, because STM span and the processing space component of working memory entail distinct…

Summarizes similarities and differences between the working memory models of Pascual-Leone and Baddeley. Debates whether each model makes a specific contribution to explanation of Kemps, De Rammelaere, and Desmet's results. Argues for necessity of theoretical task analyses. Compares a study similar to that of Kemps et al. in which different…

The influence of three mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory (PSTM capacity), attentional resource control/allocation, and processing speed) on children's complex (and simple) sentence comprehension was investigated. Fifty two children (6-12 years) completed a nonword repetition task (indexing PSTM), concurrent verbal…

In this commentary, assumptions about the nature and development of children's false memories as described in a recent article by C. J. Brainerd, V. F. Reyna, and S. J. Ceci (2008) are reviewed. Specifically, questions are raised about what drives the development of false memories in fuzzy-trace theory (FTT). Recent studies that challenge a core…

S. Ghetti (2008) and M. L. Howe (2008) presented probative ideas for future research that will deepen scientific understanding of developmental reversals on false memory and establish boundary conditions for these counterintuitive patterns. Ghetti extended the purview of current theoretical principles by formulating hypotheses about how…

Two experiments investigated short-term visual person recognition in 8- and 10-year-olds and adults within Tanaka and Farah's part-whole paradigm. Results revealed that person recognition became more accurate between 8 years and adulthood but there was no developmental shift in visual information processes with face and whole person recognition.…

Judgments of associative memory (JAM) were indexed by ratings given to pairs of cue and response words. The normed probabilities, p(response|cue), were obtained from free association norms. The ratings were linearly related to the probabilities. The JAM functions were characterized by high intercepts (approximately 50 on a 100 point scale) and…

The expert performance approach championed by Ericsson et al. provides a scientific way forward for research on giftedness, and offers exciting new ways to further one's understanding of the determinants of high ability within a particular domain of expertise. While the methods the authors use are commendable and are likely to further one's…

Assessed 5-, 6-, 8- and 9-year-olds on two working memory tasks to explore the complementarity of working memory models postulated by Pascual-Leone and Baddeley. Pascual-Leone's theory offered a clear explanation of the results concerning central aspects of working memory. Baddeley's model provided a convincing account of findings regarding the…