When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent--"truthiness." This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a…

There is now wide consensus that the quality of family relationships is involved in the development of child executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills that bear critical importance for social and academic adjustment at school. This body of research has, however, focused almost exclusively on dyadic parent-child interactions and failed…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to make inferences about mental states. Thus far, little research has examined ToM development in middle childhood. Importantly, recent studies have distinguished between making inferences about beliefs (cognitive ToM) and emotions (affective ToM). ToM has also been associated with executive functioning,…

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities.…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the link between age and proficiency in information-processing skills, based on information drawn from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The data reveal significant age-related differences in proficiencies, strongly suggesting that proficiency tends to "naturally" decline with age. Age…

Adult cognitive age differences in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III Canadian normative data were curvilinear for most scales and for the Verbal Comprehension (VC), Perceptual Organization (PO), and Working Memory (WM) factors. These showed stable or increasing scores in early adulthood followed by decreasing scores, necessitating a…

We studied the development of spatial frames of reference in children aged 3-6 years, who retrieved hidden toys from an array of identical containers bordered by landmarks under four conditions. By moving the child and/or the array between presentation and test, we varied the consistency of the hidden toy with (1) the body, and (2) the testing…

To investigate the development of children's knowledge of the intension and extension of four natural concepts (cup, scissors, money, and musical instrument), three questions were explored in an experiment involving one-hundred-and-twenty 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (40 children for each age group). Extension was measured in a verbal labeling…

To explore possible age differences, the first experiment assessed speed and maintenance of alertness in 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults. The second study tested the hypothesis that developmental variation in processing speed observed in some studies was attributable in part to age differences in alerting processes. (MP)

We examined short-term changes in younger and older adults' control beliefs. Participants completed measures of general and memory-specific competence and locus of control on 10 bi-monthly occasions. At each occasion, participants rated their control beliefs prior to and following completion of a battery of cognitive tasks. Exposure to the set of…

Children's observation of the given-new contract was tested with a task requiring children to provide novel, rather than known, information about an event to a listener. Study 1 revealed developmental differences in children's adherence to the contract: 4- and 5-year-olds showed better adherence to the contract than 3-year-olds. In Studies 2 and…

A series of studies focused on (1) the evolution of the notion of identity of objects among infants up to 15 months of age and (2) the changing rules by which this development may be understood. Six identity tasks were presented to 60 infants divided into five age groups: 5, 7, 9, 12, and 15 months. Two objects were used in all tasks. In the first…

Examines the relationship between the mental effort requirement of cumulative rehearsal and spontaneous utilization of the strategy by three groups of children (mean ages 7.6, 8.7, and 11.5 years). Results showed that the mental effort requirement of strategy use may influence children's strategy selection on memory tasks. (Author/CI)

The performance of children ages three through eight years on a series of class-inclusion problems was examined in two studies. Three patterns of performance were observed: three- and four-year-olds responded in an approximately haphazard pattern, five- and six-year-olds tended to be consistently wrong, and seven- and eight-year-olds showed a…