Pretend play is one of the most beneficial and complex forms of play that promotes a myriad of children's development. Children's engagement in pretend play can be influenced by their genders, age, material or toys available, and adults' support. Pretend play has been long studied globally, however, there is still a dearth of available information…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's…

Imagination is relevant in many aspects of our lives and has been associated with creativity and overall cognitive development, yet imagination may also have a dark side. In two studies we examined the link between imagination, anxiety, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. US college students (N = 101, Study 1) and participants from an…

To facilitate multisensory processing, the brain binds multisensory information when presented within a certain maximum time lag (temporal binding window). In addition, and in audiovisual perception specifically, the brain adapts rapidly to asynchronies within a single trial and shifts the point of subjective simultaneity. Both processes, temporal…

The purpose of this study was to examine the fears of Jordanian children and how it related to parenting styles and demographics. The study used the quantitative methodology of a survey to examine fears of a sample of 640 Jordanian children aged 4-9 in Al-Zarqa city. Results revealed that the most specific fear was imaginary or animals. The least…

Compared with other age groups, the literacy practices and creative outputs of older adults (50+ years) have been seldom researched. Generally, research about older adults has tended to focus on decline and agential passivity, rather than potentiality. In this article, we report on a small ethnographic study of older Australians who were part of a…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…

The ability to project oneself forward in time and imagine a future episode, known as episodic foresight (EpF), is an important aspect of future thinking. EpF tasks often involve children choosing an item for a future episode, yet the degree to which future projection is required to succeed -- versus memory or semantic associations -- has been…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experience about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--that is, to engage in higher-order…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experiences about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--i.e., to engage in higher-order…