Understanding that hypothesis testing is aimed at seeking information rather than producing desirable outcomes is indispensable for designing informative experiments. This study investigated the developmental course of information seeking compared to producing an effect in young children. In a between-subjects design, 4- to 6-year-olds (N = 109)…

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…

Children vary in the extent to which their development is shaped by particular experiences (e.g. maltreatment, social support). This variation raises a question: Is there no single level of plasticity that maximizes biological fitness? One influential hypothesis states that when different levels of plasticity are optimal in different environmental…

This longitudinal research examines maternal and child behaviors during joint planning over a 3-year period of middle childhood. 118 mother-child dyads were observed once a year beginning when the children were 8 years of age. Coding focused on mother and child planning behaviors, maternal instructional support, and child task engagement.…

Based on data from 710 2-parent families enrolled in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this article examined dyadic and family-level interdependence among indicators of family members' competence over time. A cross-lagged model that included children and both parents was…

Infants have shown variable success in quantity comparison tasks, with infants of a given age sometimes successfully discriminating numerical differences at a 2:3 ratio but requiring 1:2 and even 1:4 ratios of change at other times. The current explanations for these variable results include the two-systems proposal--a theoretical framework that…

Foetal growth restriction is associated with problems in neurocognitive development. In the present study, prospectively collected cohorts of foetal growth restricted (FGR) and appropriate for gestational age grown (AGA) children were examined at early school-age by using the Children's Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2) to test the hypothesis that…

We examined the prediction that the interaction between Glucocorticoid Receptor Gene ("NR3C1") methylation, stress, and experienced maternal support predicts anxious and avoidant attachment development. This was tested in a general population sample of 487 children and adolescents (44% boys, M[subscript age] = 11.84, SD[subscript age] =…

Being able to form and maintain intimate relationships is an essential part of development and the early loss of a parent may negatively affect this ability. This study investigates the association between parental loss before the age of 18 years and the formation and dissolution of marriage and cohabitation relationships in adulthood, in relation…

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…

Public prekindergarten (pre-K) programs have been a recent focus of policy and research attention, in part because of their empirically documented, positive short-term impacts on child cognitive development and school readiness. However, no studies have explored factors that might explain variation across schools in public pre-K impacts. The…

This article outlines the "over-pruning hypothesis" of autism. The hypothesis originates in a neurocomputational model of the regressive sub-type (Thomas, Knowland & Karmiloff-Smith, 2011a, 2011b). Here we develop a more general version of the over-pruning hypothesis to address heterogeneity in the timing of manifestation of ASD,…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of mind mapping activities on the maths and science skills of children 48 to 60 months of age. The study was designed using an experimental model with a pre-test post-test and a control group. Accordingly, the hypotheses of the study was that there would be meaningful differences in the values…

We investigated the role of sociocultural (between-groups) and individual (within-group) factors on the development of preschoolers' resource-allocation preferences. We tested claims of the "joint impact hypothesis" of social values development that social-emotional understanding skills would predict the transition from simpler…