Aperiodic electroencephalography (EEG) activity is hypothesized to index biological mechanisms that underpin brain functioning. This longitudinal study characterized the developmental trajectories of the aperiodic slope (i.e., aperiodic exponent) and offset from infancy to 7 years of age in a US community sample (N = 391, 46.5% female,…

The following article is a thorough literature review, discussing the impact of media technology on brain development in the context of magical thinking. This systematic literature review discusses the impact of video gaming on magical thinking in early childhood. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how media technology, especially video…

The aspects of preschool education curriculum (re)design have recently been emphasized both in various international and national legal documents and in the professional mainstream literature with the aim to support children's holistic development. The maturity and advancement of a child across cognitive, physical, social-emotional, and behavioral…

The study evaluated the effects of board games on children in a range of cognitive areas, considering both inclusion (i.e. pre- and post-comparisons, playing style [board games], participants belonging to PreKinder and Kindergarten, and experimental approach) and exclusion criteria (i.e. video games). Nineteen articles were selected using both…

Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatial representations to think about this abstract concept. Spatial representations of time are thought to support temporal concepts that might otherwise be difficult to represent and reason about, such as the temporal component of episodic memory. One common form of spatially…

Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states and feelings to others, and to understand that those mental states and feelings affect their behaviour. It is one of three core developmental tasks for children in preschool years, along with emotion self-regulation and relationships with parents and family members. Given there are…

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education is essential to the economic growth, health, and progress of the modern world. One cognitive ability that underpins thinking and learning in STEM, as well as other disciplines, is relational ability. This ability to spot common relations shared by different objects, events, ideas, or…

Recently, several studies have suggested that metacognition emerges early in infancy and toddlerhood. However, to date, the developmental trajectory of these early metacognitive monitoring and control processes and their influence on children's later memory functioning remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to longitudinally document…

This paper reports on the findings of a natural experiment based on a sample of 1123 children aged 4-8 from the provinces of Punjab in Pakistan, and Gujarat in India. It looks at the impact of attendance (or not) in early schooling on the cognitive and social-emotional development of young children. The role of school attendance was assessed over…

Self-regulation often refers to the executive influence of cognitive resources to alter prepotent responses. The ability to engage cognitive resources as a form of executive process emerges and improves in the preschool-age years while the dominance of prepotent responses, such as emotional reactions, begins to decline from toddlerhood onward.…

This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in children's development. It has been shown in previous studies that emotional intelligence not only influences academic performance but also benefits children's social and interpersonal lives. This study proposes a new strategy that integrates dialogical reading with visible thinking routines to…

The emerging field of robotics education (RE) is a new and rapidly growing subject area worldwide. It may provide a playful and novel learning environment for children to engage with all aspects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. The purpose of this research is to examine how robotics learning activities may…

Children's development during early childhood affects their well-being and educational success, but there are few reliable assessment instruments available. The aim of the study was to develop, pilot and validate an e-assessment instrument for assessing five-year-old children's development in cognitive processes, learning, language and…

Developmental delays in cognitive flexibility early in elementary school can potentially increase vulnerability for subsequent externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. The first goal of the current study was to identify latent subgroups of children characterized by different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility throughout…