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…

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challenging to evaluate replications of experimental effects and to relate performance in cognitive tasks to other constructs of interest. In developmental…

The ability to use knowledge to guide the completion of goals is a critical cognitive skill, but 3-year-olds struggle to complete goals that require multiple steps. This study asked whether 3-year-olds could benefit from "plan chunking" to complete multistep goals. Thirty-two U.S. children (range = 35.75-46.59 months; 18 girls; 9 white,…

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

We investigated whether the developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with performance on a type of delay of gratification task: a delay choice task that involved choosing between a small reward now or a larger reward the next day. In Study 1, 4- to 5-year-olds' (N = 99) EFT as measured by a tool saving task was…

Patterning, as a component of early mathematic knowledge, is a common activity carried out at elementary levels in which children are not equally successful. This study aimed to measure different variables affecting performance on patterning tasks in early childhood. For this purpose, the success of Pre-K (N = 33), K (N = 31) and first-grade…

The ability to bind, or link, different aspects of an experience in memory undergoes protracted development across childhood. Most studies of memory binding development have assessed extraobject binding between an object and some external element such as another object, whereas little work has examined the development of intraobject binding, such…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Little is explored regarding the modality-specific differences in recall abilities of preschool children. Understanding modality-specific differences in the recall at an early age might give an insight into age-linked trends, which can lay a foundation for later development. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the…

The current study examined the effect of speaker variability on children's cross-situational word learning (XSWL). The study also examined the role of bilingual experience and sustained attention. Forty English monolingual children and 40 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-7 completed a XSWL task in a Single Speaker Condition and a Multiple…

In this article we compare two frameworks for analysing young children's responses to the task of copying and extending a 6-dot triangle pattern. We used Mulligan & Mitchelmore's Awareness of Mathematical Pattern and Structure (AMPS) and then Biggs & Collis' SOLO taxonomy, both of which provide criteria for assigning levels. In comparison…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…

Three experiments examined whether 4- and 5-year-olds can explicitly revise uncertain beliefs in light of disconfirming evidence. We considered 2 factors that might influence belief revision: (a) the type and variability of evidence provided, and (b) whether children generated an explanation of their initial hypothesis. When provided with limited…

Research findings: No research to date has compared mental state language (MSL) in conversations between children and different adult talk partners, such as mothers and educators. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of MSL (verbalization of mental states such as remembering, knowing and thinking) by children, educators, and mothers…

Past research suggests that bilingualism positively affects children's performance in false belief tasks. However, researchers have yet to fully explore factors that are related to better performance in these tasks within bilingual groups. The current study includes an assessment of proficiency in both languages (which was lacking in past work)…