Executive function (EF) is a key cognitive process that emerges in early childhood and facilitates children's ability to control their own behavior. Individual differences in EF skills early in life are predictive of quality-of-life outcomes 30 years later (Moffitt et al., 2011). What changes in the brain give rise to this critical cognitive…

Human children possess the ability to approximate numerical quantity nonverbally from a young age. Over the course of early childhood, children develop increasingly precise representations of numerical values, including a symbolic number system that allows them to conceive of numerical information as Arabic numerals or number words. Functional…

A systemic analysis of early childhood development factors explains the variance in school readiness among representative U.S. 5-year-olds. The underlying theory incorporates a set of causally interactive endogenous variables that are hypothesized to be driven by the effects of three exogenous variables: parental education, immigrant status and…

As part of a longitudinal study, infant/toddler pretend play development and maternal play modelling were investigated in dyadic context. A total of 21 children were videotaped in monthly play sessions with their mothers, from age 8 to 17 months. Child and mother pretend play frequencies and levels were measured using Brown's Pretend Play…

We test whether comparison can promote learning of new relational abstractions. In Experiment 1, preschoolers heard labels for novel spatial patterns and were asked to extend the label to one of two alternatives: one sharing an object with the standard or one having the same relational pattern as the standard. Children strongly preferred the…

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old…

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine children's knowledge of semantic relations. Method: In Experiment 1, the 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults participated in an object decision task. Participants in the primed group made object decisions in response to primes that were related taxonomically, thematically, or perceptually to the…

Investigates predictions derived from the Karmiloff Smith framework for understanding the process of cognitive development. Finds broad support for the model but also indicates that behavior for some tasks is more variable than expected; and, contrary to expectations, that more abstract tasks did not disrupt behavior to any large extent. (DSK)

Describes a study conducted with kindergartners and second graders that examined developmental differences in children's production and recall of information presented via a computer presentation. Highlights include children's information processing skills; action and verbal labels; story versus list formats; and production and recall scores.…

Representational competence refers to the individual's capability to respond appropriately to external representations. For example, a child engaged in a grouping task may collect together all like objects even if the group contains varying representations of the object, including (1) the object itself, (2) a three-dimensional likeness of the…

The working memory hypothesis that the development of span in children is related to increasing proficiency in the use of an articulatory loop was tested in two studies with 120 Canadian children in grades 5 and 6 and 11 and 12. Some support was found for the hypothesis. (SLD)