Sensitivity to auditory rhythmic structures in music and language is evident as early as infancy, but performance on beat perception tasks is often well below adult levels and improves gradually with age. While some research has suggested the ability to perceive musical beat develops early, even in infancy, it remains unclear whether adult-like…

Studies of reward effects on behavior in adolescence typically rely on performance metrics that confound myriad cognitive and non-cognitive processes, making it challenging to determine which process is impacted by reward. The present longitudinal study applied the diffusion decision model to a reward task to isolate the influence of reward on…

Psychosexual functioning is an important aspect of human development and relationships. A previous study investigated psychosexual functioning of autistic adolescents using the Teen Transition Inventory (TTI), but there is a lack of comprehensive measurement of psychosexual functioning among autistic and non-autistic (NA) adults. To address this…

As a novel approach to conceptualizing executive functions, this study applied network analysis to a common battery of executive function tests administered to a sample covering the life span. Participants (N = 3,944; age: M = 20.8 years, SD = 19.6, range: 3-85; maternal/self education: M = 12.9 years, SD = 2.6; 53.3% girls/women, 46.7% boys/men;…

Differences in the default mode network are among the most replicated brain-level findings in autistic individuals. Furthermore, subregions within the default mode network are associated with cognitive functions such as mentalising that are immediately relevant to cognitive theories of autism. Recent evidence suggests that the default mode network…

This study examined prosocial bystander behavior in an online ball-throwing game (Cyberball), toward the exclusion of immigrants and nonimmigrant peers within intergroup and intragroup contexts. Participants were British children (8- to 10-year-olds) and adolescents (13- to 15-year-olds, N = 292; female N = 144). They were an ethnically diverse…

A growing literature suggests that adversity is associated with later altered brain function, particularly within the corticolimbic system that supports emotion processing and salience detection (e.g., amygdala, prefrontal cortex [PFC]). Although neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage has been shown to predict maladaptive behavioral outcomes,…

The last decades of neuroimaging research has revealed atypical development of intrinsic functional connectivity within and between large-scale cortical networks in autism spectrum disorder, but much remains unknown about cortico-subcortical developmental connectivity atypicalities. This study examined cortico-striatal developmental intrinsic…

Mathematical knowledge is constructed hierarchically from basic understanding of quantities and the symbols that denote them. Discrimination of numerical quantity in both symbolic and non-symbolic formats has been linked to mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, little is known of the extent to which overlap in quantity representations…

This study compares the achievement of two cohorts of immigrants with ages between 7 and 30 years old. Two sets of participants were assessed in two points in time and in different regions of Portugal. 169 students with similar immigration conditions for this analysis (nationality, length of residence, previous education in the country of origin)…

Previous studies show that newborn infants and adults orient their attention preferentially toward human faces. However, the developmental changes of visual attention captured by face stimuli remain unclear, especially when an explicit top-down process is involved. We capitalized on a visual search paradigm to assess how the relative strength of…

Youth purpose has important implications for behavior and well-being, yet there is limited information about the types of purpose that young people pursue. The current study contributes insight into the content of purpose through a survey of 316 adolescents and young adults. Analyses of responses revealed that young people rated their purposes as…

We investigated the developmental courses of both implicit and explicit racial biases in relation to the perceived social status of outgroups. We did so by assessing these biases among Chinese participants (N = 200, age range from 4- to 19-year-olds) toward 2 different other-race groups that differ in terms of perceived social status (i.e., Whites…

Interference control is central to cognitive control and, more generally, to many aspects of development. Despite its importance, the understanding of the processes underlying mean interference effects across development is still limited. When measured through conflict tasks, mean interference effects reflect both the strength of the initial…

Purpose: We investigated developmental differences in a dual task involving rhyming and tone judgment/decisions and the effects of varying cognitive demands on task performance. Method: Participants were 7- to 11-year-olds, 12- to 15-year-olds, and adults between 18 and 40 years (n = 19 per group). The rhyming task consisted of three stimuli…