Children are limited in visual search accuracy and this ability increases from childhood to adolescence. Developmental limitations in visual search could be related to children's difficulties in efficiently planning and executing their search, often assessed with cancellation tasks. However, few studies have examined age-related changes in visual…

In some contexts (e.g., legal and medical), it is imperative that children indicate when they do not understand an adult's question. Yet, little research has examined children's clarification requests. We asked 122 4- to 9-year-olds tricky and simple interview questions to assess how often and how children request clarification in interviews, the…

Although most U. S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number -- that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to…

We investigated whether selective discussion of autobiographical memory narratives would impact the quality of young people's recall of their nondiscussed memory narratives. Children (ages 8-9 years, n = 65) and adolescents (ages 13-15 years, n = 58) completed an adapted version of the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm for self-generated…

Memory for the temporal order of past events is a critical capacity; however, relatively little is known about its development and the processes that support it in early to middle childhood. The aim of this study was to examine children's memory for the temporal order of real-world events. Four-five-year-old (n = 36), 6-7-year-old (n = 45) and…

Children's learning and cognitive development have a distinct receptivity to the circumstances of childhood. However, not all children have equal opportunities and learning inequities continue to be influenced by the social and economic circumstances of childhood. Examining factors within the environments that children are growing up in, and the…

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…

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have…

Functional connectivity within and between Intrinsic Connectivity Networks (ICNs) transforms over development and is thought to support high order cognitive functions. But how variable is this process, and does it diverge with altered cognitive development? We investigated age-related changes in integration and segregation within and between ICNs…

Adult observers are sensitive to the configuration of facial features within a face, able to distinguish between relative differences in feature spacing, and detecting deviations from typical facial appearance. How does the representation of the typical configuration of facial features develop? While there is a great deal of work describing…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) consecutive to its repeated pairing with a valent unconditioned stimulus (US). We relied on a multinomial processing tree model to compare the processes underlying EC in middle-aged children (n = 57, M[subscript age] = 8.65, range = 6.94-11.03; 31 females) and…

In the adult brain, biases in the allocation of spatial attention can be measured using a line bisection task and are directly relatable to neural attention signals in the fronto-parietal attention network. Behavioral studies on the development of spatial biases have yielded a host of inconsistent results, likely due to variance in sample size,…

In four experiments, we investigate how the ability to detect irrelevant explanations develops. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4- to 8-year-olds and adults rated different types of explanations about "what makes cars go" individually, in the absence of a direct contrast. Each explanation was true and relevant (e.g., "Cars have engines that…