The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have…

Abstract Few studies have examined how socioeconomic status (SES) affects two essential parts of human development, namely vocabulary and reading comprehension, in children facing severe poverty. The Roma population is the largest minority group in Europe, the majority of whom live in severe poverty. This study compared the development of 322 Roma…

Most of what is known about the association between children's executive function (EF) and school readiness skills is derived from research conducted in Western countries. We tested whether these associations were evident in a middle-income country context. Participants were 1,480 children, aged 4-7 years old, who participated in an endline…

Studies from high-income populations have shown that stimulating, supportive communicative input from parents promote children's cognitive and language development. However, fewer studies have identified specific features of input supporting the healthy development of children growing up in low- or middle-income countries. The current study…

There is ample evidence of racial and gender bias in young children, but thus far this evidence comes almost exclusively from children's responses to a single social category (either race or gender). Yet we are each simultaneously members of many social categories (including our race and gender). Among adults, racial and gender biases intersect:…

In the adult brain, biases in the allocation of spatial attention can be measured using a line bisection task and are directly relatable to neural attention signals in the fronto-parietal attention network. Behavioral studies on the development of spatial biases have yielded a host of inconsistent results, likely due to variance in sample size,…

Stunting has been negatively associated with children's development. We examined the range of height by testing hypotheses: (a) height is positively associated with children's development, with associations moderated by inflammation and (b) home environments characterized by nurturance and early learning opportunities is positively associated with…

Sleep spindles are related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities. However, they undergo drastic maturational changes during adolescence. Here we used a longitudinal approach (across 7 years) to explore whether developmental changes in sleep spindle density can explain individual differences in sleep-dependent…

Spatial skills support STEM learning and achievement. However, children from low-socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds typically lag behind their middle- and high-SES peers. We asked whether a digital educational app--designed to mirror an already successful, spatial assembly training program using concrete materials--would be as effective for…

Young children spend a lot of time at home, yet there is little empirical research on how they spend that time and how it relates to developmental outcomes. Prior research suggests less-structured time--where children practice making choices and setting goals--may develop "self-directed" executive function in 6-year-olds. But…

Both humans and non-human animals exhibit sensitivity to the approximate number of items in a visual array, as indexed by their performance in numerosity discrimination tasks, and even neonates can detect changes in numerosity. These findings are often interpreted as evidence for an innate 'number sense'. However, recent simulation work has…

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same…

Interventions focused on the home language environment have been shown to improve a number of child language outcomes in the first years of life. However, data on the longer-term effects of the intervention are still somewhat limited. The current study examines child vocabulary and complex speech outcomes (N = 59) during the year following…

Variation in how frequently caregivers engage with their children is associated with variation in children's later language outcomes. One explanation for this link is that caregivers use both verbal behaviors, such as labels, and non-verbal behaviors, such as gestures, to help children establish reference to objects or events in the world.…

The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult-like strategy. This paper examines another…