Social-emotional skills as valid predictors for subsequent school success should be promoted in early childhood. Preschools are a relevant setting to reach children from families with low socioeconomic status. The federal state law for children´s day-care and preschools in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania offers preschools in difficult…

Research Findings: We assessed socio-emotional behavior, nonverbal reasoning, German receptive language, and motor skills of refugee children attending early childhood development [ECD] programs and of those who did not (N = 207, mean age = 69.4 months). Young refugee children overall demonstrated lower levels of development and more…

This study uses CiteSpace, a bibliometric and visualization-analysis tool, to present a systematic analysis of literature in the Web of Science database on physiological-synchrony evoked by attentional engagement. It reviews the publication timeframe, authorship, keywords, and leading institutions and regions, along with burst terms and highly…

At what ages are young people most open to political influence? We test the "formative years" model that underscores the importance of childhood experiences for political development against the "impressionable years" model that asserts the primacy of lessons learned during adolescence. To assess the relative merits of these…

The architecture of sleep undergoes distinct changes during childhood and early adolescence. Slow wave sleep is involved in memory processing and may support active consolidation of newly encoded representations to support the formation of abstracted "gist" memories. Here, we examined sleep and overnight memory formation in German school…

The current study investigated the effects of metacognitive and executive function (EF) training on childhood EF (inhibition, working memory [WM], cognitive flexibility, and proactive/reactive control) and academic skills (reading, reasoning, and math) among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Children (N = 134, M[subscript age] = 8.70 years)…

We investigate how the ability to respond appropriately to reasons provided in discourse develops in young children. In Study 1 (N = 58, Germany, 26 girls), 4- and 5-, but not 3-year-old children, differentiated good from bad reasons. In Study 2 (N = 131, Germany, 64 girls), 4- and 5-year-old children considered both the strength of evidence for…

A foundational mechanism underlying human cooperation is reciprocity. In the context of repeated interactions with others, it is not always clear the degree to which in-kind responses reflect responsiveness to partners' prior behaviors ("reactive" responses), an interest unrelated to the partner ("nonreactive" responses), or…

If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic impeded children's skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. To understand the pandemic's effects on school children, this paper combines a review of the emerging international literature with new evidence from German longitudinal time-use…

The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support the development of children's early cognitive competencies. A growing number of studies have assessed the HLE by using different conceptual approaches and various assessment methods, often focusing on either the home literacy environment or the home…

Background: Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) frequently have difficulties performing gross motor skills such as the overarm throw. Our study examines the differences in both qualitative and quantitative characteristics of overarm throwing for accuracy between typically developing (TD) and children with DCD. Methods: A total…

In a longitudinal study (N = 54), we investigated the developmental relation between children's implicit and explicit theory of mind and executive functions. We found that implicit false belief understanding at 18 months was correlated with explicit false belief understanding at 4 to 5 years of age, with the latter being closely related to…

Previous cross-cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context-sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the…

Social dimensions of the caregiving environment, like secure relationships to caregivers and high interactional classroom quality, are seen to directly or indirectly stimulate children's learning and development. However, little is known about the underlying processes, specifically with regard to the role of peers. To fill this gap we videotaped…

Evidence suggests that children struggle to acquire age-appropriate fundamental movement skills (FMS), despite their importance for facilitating physical activity. This has led to calls for routine school-based screening of children's FMS. However, there is limited research exploring schools' capacity to conduct such assessments. This study…