Cognitive interventions that involve executive functions (EF)-demanding activities are effective in changing task-related brain activity in children from homes with low socioeconomic status (SES). However, less is known about the efficiency of EF-based interventions in modifying segregation and integration properties of the functional neural…

Kim and Opfer (2017) found that number-line estimates increased approximately logarithmically with number when an upper bound (e.g., 100 or 1000) was explicitly marked (bounded condition) and when no upper bound was marked (unbounded condition). Using procedural suggestions from Cohen and Ray (2020), we examined whether this logarithmicity might…

Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved…

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…

Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to…

Debates about lowering the voting age often center on whether 16- and 17-year-old adolescents possess sufficient cognitive capacity and political knowledge to participate in politics. Little empirical research has examined age differences in adolescents' and adults' complexity of reasoning about political issues. We surveyed adults (n = 778;…

The architecture of sleep undergoes distinct changes during childhood and early adolescence. Slow wave sleep is involved in memory processing and may support active consolidation of newly encoded representations to support the formation of abstracted "gist" memories. Here, we examined sleep and overnight memory formation in German school…

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

We investigated whether the developmental emergence of episodic future thinking (EFT) is associated with performance on a type of delay of gratification task: a delay choice task that involved choosing between a small reward now or a larger reward the next day. In Study 1, 4- to 5-year-olds' (N = 99) EFT as measured by a tool saving task was…

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their…

The current paper reports long-term impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation taken toward the end of students' high school careers. The CSRP was a self-regulation-focused early childhood intervention implemented in Head Start centers serving high-poverty…

This study examined the longitudinal associations of various executive function components with subsequent psychiatric problems in Chinese school-age children. Data from 1,639 children (44.36% girls) ages 6-13 years were drawn from the Children School Functions and Brain Development project. Executive function components were assessed by the…

The aim of the present study was to examine the kinds of developmental profiles of arithmetic fluency skills that can be identified across Grades 1-9 (ages 7-16) in a large Finnish sample (n = 2,518). The study also examined whether membership in the developmental profiles could be predicted using a comprehensive set of kindergarten-age factors,…

We investigated mental rotation in children by systematically varying the adult cube aggregate's set size, rotation angle, and picture/depth plane rotations in a new test. Eighty 4- to 11-year-old mainly middle-class children (British Indian and British African majority and white minority; 40 girls and 40 boys) were assessed using the new…

In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1,…