Directed forgetting is a laboratory task in which subjects are told to remember some information and forget other information. In directed forgetting tasks, participants are able to exert intentional control over which information they retain in memory and which information they forget. Forgetting in this task appears to be mediated by intentional…

Including robots in children's lives calls for reflection on the psychological and moral aspects of such relationships, especially with respect to children's ability to differentiate intentional from unintentional false statements, that is, lies from mistakes. This ability calls for an understanding of an interlocutor's intentions. This study…

Expectations for increased conceptual outcomes in the early childhood education sector have foregrounded a need for more evidenced-based practice in support of children's play. One such avenue for researching models of play practices that support cognitive outcomes is to study the implementation of Playworlds. Grounded in cultural-historical…

We examine the association between parenting practices (discipline and support) and children's cognitive effort. Cognitive effort is hard to measure; hence, little is known about effort dispositions, and how parenting practices affect effort. We analyse data from 1,148 fifth-grade students from Berlin and Madrid (around 11 years of age). Cognitive…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

Motor skills have been linked to language and social development with implications for theory of mind. This study examined theory of mind (attribution of intentions task) in school-age children (N = 62, mean age 8 years; 2 months, standard deviation [SD] = 1;3) in relation to fine motor skills (grooved pegboard), receptive vocabulary (Peabody…

Theory of mind describes the ability to engage in perspective-taking, understand intentions, and predict actions and emotions. Theory of mind typically achieves major developmental milestones around age of 5, coinciding with the transition to kindergarten, and is associated with a verbal ability (receptive and expressive vocabulary), executive…

A variety of theories have been used to develop interventions designed to improve health behaviors in college students; however, many people who intend to engage in healthy behaviors still fall short of their goals. While clarifying the relationship between intention and actual behavior has been challenging for researchers, the Temporal…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) is the ability to remember to perform an intention in response to an environmental cue. Recent microstructure models postulate four distinguishable stages of successful event-based PM fulfillment. That is, (a) the event must be noticed, (b) the intention must be retrieved, (c) the context must be verified, and…

Background: Problematic alcohol use is associated with neuropsychological consequences, including cognitive biases. The goal of the study was to explore the moderating role of executive control and readiness to change on the relationship between alcohol use and cognitive biases in light and problematic drinkers with and without mild to borderline…

The current study examined the impact of retention interval task difficulty on 4- and 5-year-olds' prospective memory (PM) to test the hypothesis that children periodically monitor their intentions during the retention interval and that disrupting this monitoring may result in poorer PM performance. In addition, relations among PM, working memory,…

Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function?…

Prospective memory (PM) research typically examines the ability to remember to execute delayed intentions but often ignores the ability to forget finished intentions. We had participants perform (or not perform; control group) a PM task and then instructed them that the PM task was finished. We later (re)presented the PM cue. Approximately 25% of…