Across the early childhood period of development, young children exhibit considerable growth in their executive functioning (EF) and vocabulary abilities. Understanding the developmental trajectory of these seemingly interrelated processes is important as both early vocabulary and EF have been shown to predict critical academic and socio-emotional…

The relation between maternal behavior and neurocognitive development is complex and may depend on the task context. We examined 5-month-old infant frontal electroencephalogram (EEG), maternal intrusiveness (MI) evaluated during two play contexts at 5 and 10 months, and a battery of executive function (EF) tasks completed at 48 months to evaluate…

Item recognition and temporal order memory follow different developmental trajectories during middle childhood, with item recognition performance stabilizing and temporal order memory performance continuing to improve. We investigated the potential unique role of individual executive functions on item recognition and temporal order memory during…

Social cognition is a set of complex processes that mediate much of human behavior. The development of these skills is related to and interdependent on other cognitive processes, particularly inhibitory control. Brain regions associated with inhibitory control and social cognition overlap functionally and structurally, especially with respect to…

Executive attention, the attention necessary to reconcile conflict among simultaneous attentional demands, is vital to children's daily lives. This attention develops rapidly as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal areas mature during early and middle childhood. However, the developmental course of executive attention is not uniform among…

This study provides the first analyses connecting individual differences in infant attention to reading achievement through the development of executive functioning (EF) in infancy and early childhood. Five-month-old infants observed a video, and peak look duration and shift rate were video coded and assessed. At 10 months, as well as 3, 4, and…

When children transition to school between the ages of 4 and 6 years, they must learn to control their attention and behaviour to be successful. Concurrently, executive function (EF) is an important skill undergoing significant development in childhood. To understand changes occurring during this period, we examined the role of parenting in the…

In the first year of life, the ability to search for hidden objects is an indicator of object permanence and, when multiple locations are involved, executive function (i.e. inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory). The current study was designed to examine attentional predictors of search in 5-month-old infants (as measured by the…

Individual differences in infant attention are theorized to reflect the speed of information processing and are related to later cognitive abilities (i.e., memory, language, and intelligence). This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of infant attention and early childhood executive function (EF; e.g., working memory,…

Age-related differences in episodic memory judgments assessing recall of fact information and the source of this information were examined. The role of executive function (EF) in supporting early episodic memory ability was also explored. Four- and 6-year-old children were taught 10 novel facts from two different sources (experimenter or puppet),…

Moderate, yet relatively consistent, associations between cognitive performance and shyness have been reported throughout the child and adult literatures. The current study assessed longitudinal associations between cognition (i.e., executive functioning) and parent-report temperamental shyness from infancy to early childhood and used temporal…

Background: Maternal executive function and household regulation both are critical aspects of optimal childrearing, but their interplay is not understood. We tested the hypotheses that (a) the link between challenging child conduct problems and harsh parenting would be strongest for mothers with poorer executive function and weakest among those…