For many years, researchers studied executive functions (EFs) in the laboratory with a focus on understanding an individual child's development and brain processes in a controlled environment. Building on this foundational research, there is a growing interest in EFs in the context of a child's dynamic, social world, and the contextual and…

Prior work has conceptualized children's executive function and self-regulation skills as relatively stable across short periods of time. Grounded in long-standing contextual theories of human development, this study introduces a new observational tool for measuring children's regulatory skills across different naturally occurring situations…

Across two experiments, we investigated how verbal labels impact the way young children attend to proportional information, well before the introduction of formal fraction education. Five- to seven-year-old children were introduced to equivalent non-symbolic proportions labeled in one of three ways: (a) a single, categorical label for multiple…

Human adults are adept at mitigating the influence of sensory uncertainty on task performance by integrating sensory cues with learned prior information, in a Bayes-optimal fashion. Previous research has shown that young children and infants are sensitive to environmental regularities, and that the ability to learn and use such regularities is…

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains;…

Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other's rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

Mental rotation has emerged as an important predictor of success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). By the age of 4.5 years, boys outperform girls in these abilities. Because parents use less spatial language with girls at this age (Pruden and Levine, 2017), the amount of spatial language that children are exposed to at home is…

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, children often gesture and, at times, these gestures convey information that is different from the information conveyed in speech. Children who produce these gesture-speech "mismatches" on a particular task have been found to profit from instruction on that task. We have recently found…

Selective attention is fundamental for learning across many situations, yet it exhibits protracted development, with young children often failing to filter out distractors. In this research, we examine links between selective attention and working memory (WM) capacity across development. One possibility is that WM is resource-limited, with…

Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish-learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however,…

The present research examined the consequences of telling young children they have a reputation for being smart. Of interest was how this would affect their willingness to resist the temptation to cheat for personal gain as assessed by a temptation resistance task, in which children promised not to cheat in the game. Two studies with 3- and…

Verb learning is difficult for children (Gentner, [Gentner, D., 1982]), partially because children have a bias to associate a novel verb not only with the action it represents, but also with the object on which it is learned (Kersten & Smith, [Kersten, A.W., 2002]). Here we investigate how well 4- and 5-year-old children (N = 48) generalize…

There is strong support for the view that children growing up in low-income homes typically evince poorer performance on tests of inhibitory control compared to those growing up in higher income homes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the work documenting this association has been conducted in high-income countries. It is not yet known whether…

We investigated whether encouraging young children to discuss the mental states of an immigrant group would elicit more prosocial behaviour towards them and impact on their perception of a group member's emotional experience. Five- and 6-year-old children were either prompted to talk about the thoughts and feelings of this social group or to talk…