Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young…

This study investigated the development of divergent thinking (DT) in early childhood. We followed 107 4-year-olds for 1.5 years. Children's DT was assessed with the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) every 6 months, four times in total. Within the AUT, children were asked to generate unusual uses of common objects while explaining how they came up with…

The number line estimation task is frequently used to measure children's numerical magnitude understanding. It is unclear whether the resulting straight, horizontal, left-to-right-oriented estimate patterns indicate task constraints or children's intuitive number--space mapping. Three- to six-year-old children (N = 72, M[subscript age] = 4.89, 56%…

Young children can generalize from known to novel, but the underlying mechanism is still debated. Some argue that from an early age generalization is category-based and undergoes little development, while others believe that early generalization is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time. The current research brings new…

In industrialized societies, adults exhibit stable preferences for the types of people, animals, and entities they feel moral concern for (Crimston et al., 2016). Only one published study to date has utilized the moral circles paradigm to examine these preferences in children, finding that as children age, their preferences shift to become more…

There is mounting empirical evidence to suggest that adults are intuitively cooperative. When presented with a cooperative dilemma between self-maximizing and benefitting the common good, decisions made quickly are more likely to be cooperative, whereas slow decisions tend to favor self-interest. To investigate the ontogenetic origins of intuitive…

Previous studies have identified patterns of coordinated control when adults combine gait and grasping. What remains unclear is whether the coordination of these two tasks differs between adolescent and adult groups. Groups of adults and adolescents were asked to walk across an instrumented gait mat in three conditions: walk forward, walk and…

Although stories for children often feature supernatural and fantastical events, children themselves often prefer realistic events when choosing what should happen in a story. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 5-year-olds (total N = 240 from diverse backgrounds) might be more likely to include fantastical events in stories about…

A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds (N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external…

Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual…

The paper discusses an alternative method of assessing the difficulty of pupils' programming tasks to determine their age appropriateness. Building a program takes the form of its successive iterations. Thus, it is possible to monitor the number of times such a program was built by the solver. The variance of the number of program builds can be…

Previous research shows that children evaluate the competence of others based on how effectively someone accomplished a goal, that is, based on the observed outcome of an action (e.g., number of attempts needed). Here, we investigate whether 5- to 10-year-old children and adults infer competence from how efficiently someone solves a task by…

The system of second person singular forms of address (2PS) in Medellín, Colombia is tripartite consisting of "tú, vos," and "usted," while also including the existence of a dual "usted." The current study compares usage of the intimate "usted" versus the distant "usted" with data from an oral…

Prospective memory (PM) is vital for children to live independently. Theoretical and empirical evidence has shown that executive function (EF) plays an important role in children's PM. However, there is no EF training for the PM of school-age children. Therefore, a 4-week EF training programme was conducted in this study to investigate the…

Research has established that reading and writing skills are closely linked for most individuals, which can be explained by the shared knowledge and functional relations theoretical perspectives. The current study used quantile regression to explore differences between and within Grades 3-5 in the United States in the associations between a…