There is renewed interest in person-centered approaches to understanding the structure of temperament. However, questions concerning temperament types are not frequently framed in a developmental context, especially during infancy. In addition, the most common person-centered techniques, cluster analysis (CA) and latent profile analysis (LPA),…

The world's population is aging at an increasing rate. Even in the absence of neurodegenerative disorders, healthy aging affects perception and cognition. In the context of cognition, common factors are well established. Much less is known about common factors for vision. Here, we tested 92 healthy older and 104 healthy younger participants in 19…

Children often answer questions when they do not have the requisite knowledge or when they do not understand them. We examined whether "ground rules" instruction--to say "I don't know," to tell the truth, and to correct the interviewer when necessary--assisted children in applying those rules during an interview about a past…

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…

When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did…

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…

In the present research, we provide empirical evidence for the process of symbolic integration of number associations, focusing on the development of simple addition (e.g., 5 + 3 = 8), subtraction (e.g., 5 - 3 = 2), and multiplication (e.g., 5 × 3 = 15). Canadian children were assessed twice, in Grade 2 and Grade 3 (N = 244; 55% girls). All…

Recent evidence from studies using head cameras suggests that the frequency of faces directly in front of infants "declines" over the first year and a half of life, a result that has implications for the development of and evolutionary constraints on face processing. Two experiments tested 2 opposing hypotheses about this observed…

The development of implicit and explicit racial attitudes were investigated in 542 White, Pardo, and Black Brazilian children and adolescents (aged 6 to 14) from 2 different regional contexts that vary dramatically in their racial diversity, Bahia (BA) and Rio Grande do Sul (RS). Results revealed the pervasive presence of race biases favoring…

Although adolescents around the world play video games, little is known about their longitudinal effects on adolescents from Eastern countries. This large longitudinal violent video game study has 4 strengths. First, it is the first longitudinal study conducted with Chinese adolescents. Second, it examines moral disengagement as a possible…

Within a language, there is considerable variation in the pronunciations of words owing to social factors like age, gender, nationality, and race. In the present study, we investigate whether toddlers link social and linguistic variation during word learning. In Experiment 1, 24- to 26-month-old toddlers were exposed to two talkers whose front…

Children interact with and learn about all types of sound sources, including dogs, bells, trains, and human beings. Although it is clear that knowledge of semantic categories for everyday sights and sounds develops during childhood, there are very few studies examining how children use this knowledge to make sense of auditory scenes. We used a…

This study explores the role of a particular social cue--the "sequence" of demonstrated actions and events--in preschooler's categorization. A demonstrator sorted objects that varied on both a surface feature (color) and a nonobvious property (sound made when shaken). Children saw a sequence of actions in which the nonobvious property…

Governments around the world are increasing investments in early childhood education as a way to promote children's learning and development. As research grows on the longer-term effects of early educational programs, some have hypothesized that sustained impacts may depend on the quality of children's subsequent classroom environments and may be…