Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Time is central to any understanding of the world. In adults, estimation errors grow linearly with the length of the interval, much faster than would be expected of a clock-like mechanism. Here we present the first direct demonstration that this is also true in human infants. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined 4-, 6-, 10-, and…

As a large heterogeneity is observed across studies on interference control in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research may benefit from the use of a cognitive framework that models specific processes underlying reactive and proactive control of interference. Reactive control refers to the expression and suppression of responses and proactive…

In simple rule-switching tests, 3- and 4-year-olds can follow each of two sorting rules but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g., inhibition). However, they might also reflect…

In the present study, we investigated genetic and environmental effects on motor impulsivity from childhood to late adolescence using a longitudinal sample of twins from ages 9 to 18 years. Motor impulsivity was assessed using errors of commission (no-go errors) in a visual go/no-go task at 4 time points: ages 9-10, 11-13, 14-15, and 16-18 years.…

Inhibitory control and incentive processes underlie decision making, yet few studies have explicitly examined their interaction across development. Here, the effects of potential rewards and losses on inhibitory control in 64 adolescents (13- to 17-year-olds) and 42 young adults (18- to 29-year-olds) were examined using an incentivized antisaccade…

The conflict monitoring account posits that globally high levels of conflict trigger engagement of top-down control; however, recent findings point to the mercurial nature of top-down control in high conflict contexts. The current study examined the potential moderating effect of associative learning on conflict-triggered top-down control…

This article presents a meta-analysis of research on "evaluative conditioning" (EC), defined as a change in the liking of a stimulus (conditioned stimulus; CS) that results from pairing that stimulus with other positive or negative stimuli (unconditioned stimulus; US). Across a total of 214 studies included in the main sample, the mean…

In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the developmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2 to 4. Ninety children read 108 pseudowords presented without or with a diacritic either in the same or in a different position relative to the source word. Half of the pseudowords resembled the…

Tests the effects of stimulus variability on overgeneralization and overdiscrimination errors in children and adults. The subjects (n=64), adults and five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children, participated in a visual discrimination task. (CM)

Evaluated the effects of stimulus complexity and rule usage on a visual perspective-taking task administered to preschoolers, first, third, and fifth graders, and adults. Errors decreased with age, and more errors occurred with the more complex visual arrays. Very young children could not reliably match a photograph to a physical array. (Author/RH)

Focuses on differences occurring with age and reading skill in the use of phonemic codes in short-term retention tasks where stimuli were presented visually. Subjects were groups of average readers in grades two, four, and six; superior readers in grade four; and disabled readers in grades four and six from three public schools. (Author/RH)

Visual selective attention is the ability to attend to relevant visual information and ignore irrelevant stimuli. Little is known about its typical and atypical development in early childhood. Experiment 1 investigates typically developing toddlers' visual search for multiple targets on a touch-screen. Time to hit a target, distance between…