The term executive function is used increasingly within developmental psychology and is often taken to refer to unfolding brain processes. We trace the origins of research on executive function to show that the link with social interaction has a long history. We suggest that a recent frenzy of research exploring methods for studying individual…

This study explored the cognitive performance of children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and/or Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV. Participants were 62 children with ages between 9 years 8 months and 12 years 7 months. These children were placed into one of the…

Few studies have examined the influence of environmental factors on children's executive functioning (EF) performance. The present study examined the effects of a punitive vs. non-punitive school environment on West African children's EF skills. Tasks included a "cool" (relatively non-affective) and "hot" (relatively…

Building on an existing latent variable analysis of executive function (EF) in children (N=191, 57% boys and 43% girls) making the transition to school (Hughes et al. (2010), "Developmental Neuropsychology", vol. 35, pp. 20-36), the current study both documented average developmental improvements from 4 to 6 years of age and examined individual…

In a German out-of-school laboratory, 293 medium-achieving 10th-grade students participated in a lesson unit about gene technology. They were divided into two groups (I-1, I-2), both of which followed the same hands-on lesson procedure. Students within I-2 were additionally confronted with alternative conceptions to central issues of the specific…

In adults, most cognitive and emotional self-regulation is carried out by a network of brain regions, including the anterior cingulate, insula, and areas of the basal ganglia, related to executive attention. We propose that during infancy, control systems depend primarily upon a brain network involved in orienting to sensory events that includes…

The aim of this report was to investigate the prospective links between infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning (EF). The authors assessed sleep regulation through a parent sleep diary when children were 12 and 18 months old (N = 60). Child EF was assessed at 18 and 26 months of age. Higher proportions of total sleep occurring…

Using 20 levels of intensity, we measured children's thresholds to discriminate the six basic emotional expressions from neutral and their misidentification rates. Combined with the results of a previous study using the same method ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102" (2009) 503-521), the results indicate that by 5 years of age,…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Behavioral studies show that infants are capable of discriminating the number of objects or events in their environment, while also suggesting that number discrimination in infancy may be ratio-dependent. However, due to limitations of the dependent measures used with infant behavioral studies, the evidence for ratio dependence falls short of the…

Recent studies have shown that after partial spinal-cord lesion at the mid-cervical segment, the remaining pathways compensate for restoring finger dexterity; however, how they control hand/arm muscles has remained unclear. To elucidate the changes in dynamic properties of neural circuits connecting the motor cortex and hand/arm muscles, we…

A number of authors have proposed models of cognitive development that explain improvements in intelligence over the course of childhood via changes in the efficiency of inhibitory processes (Anderson, 2001; Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1990; Dempster, 1991, 1992; Dempster & Corkill, 1999a; Harnishfeger, 1995; Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1993). A…

Recognizing relational similarity relies on the ability to understand that defining object properties might not lie in the objects individually, but in the relations of the properties of various object to each other. This aptitude is highly relevant for many important human skills such as language, reasoning, categorization and understanding…

Research has demonstrated that differential parental scaffolding utterances influence children's development of executive function. Traditional conceptualizations of scaffolding, though, have difficulty in explaining how such differential effects influence children's cognitive development; they do not account for the timing of parental utterances…

Research shows that mental representation such as analogical reasoning is a fundamental cognitive tool for design problem solving (Daugherty & Mentzer, 2008; Hey, Lensey, Agogino, & Wood, 2008; Lewis, 2008). Not much is known, however, about the way students and professional engineers actively generate and change their mental representation when…