Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms driving this development. One-hundred and twenty seven 6-12 year-old children…

The education of gifted children is of considerable interest. The present study focused on the effect of enriched education on intellectually gifted children's attention. In the present study, 7-12-year-old children completed seven tests of attention (alertness, focused attention, divided attention, attentional switching, sustained attention,…

The developmental trajectories of several attention components, such as orienting, inhibition, and the guidance of selection by relevance (i.e., advance knowledge relevant to the task) were investigated in 498 participants (ages 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 20). The paradigm was based on Michael et al.'s (2006) master activation map model and consisted of…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…

What cognitive processes influence how well we maintain information in visual short-term memory (VSTM)? We used a developmentally informed design to delve into the interplay of top-down spatial biases with the nature of the internal memory codes, motivated by documented changes for both factors over childhood. Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and…

Children's speed and fluency of writing has elsewhere been shown to correlate with the quality of their composition. Here, we compared speed and fluency of text production when children aged between 6 and 11 used either a pen or a computer keyboard. Younger children were reliably slower and less fluent when writing at a keyboard. All children were…