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…

Background: Within the same school class, it is usual to find children who differ in age by almost a full calendar year. Although associations between being relatively young and poor academic outcomes are well documented, and relatively consistent, the associations between being relatively young and psychosocial outcomes are less clearly…

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…

Knowing humor development can be rather beneficial in terms of providing opportunities to better know children and evaluate their development. This study aimed to explore the process of humor development in preschool and primary school children in line with McGhee's humor development theory. The study employed a single screening model,…

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…

Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, has been considered as an early-maturing and domain-general mechanism that is critical for typical language development. However, recent evidence in neurotypical adults and children have found that individuals can vary in their SL abilities across linguistic and…

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as…

Information sampling about others' trustworthiness prior to cooperation allows humans to minimize the risk of exploitation. Here, we examined whether early adolescence or preadolescence, a stage defined as in between childhood and adolescence, is a significant developmental period for strategic social decisions. We also sought to characterize…

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…

This essay explores the journey college men face as they negotiate the formation and development of their digital and masculine identities from first year to senior year. Several objectives guide this article: (1) to provide insight into how and why the landscape of identity development has shifted for men; (2) to offer recommendations for…

Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

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…

Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not…

The natural pedagogy hypothesis proposes that human infants preferentially attend to communicative signals from others, facilitating rapid cultural learning. In this view, sensitivity to such signals is a uniquely human adaptation and as such nonhuman animals should not produce or utilize these communicative signals. We test these evolutionary…

Perceptual judgments result from a dynamic process, but little is known about the dynamics of number-line estimation. A recent study proposed a computational model that combined a model of trial-to-trial changes with a model for the internal scaling of discrete numbers. Here, we tested a surprising prediction of the model--a situation in which…