Musical perception is a fundamental of music teaching. Even if it's considered as a field concerning institutions providing vocational musical education, it takes a part in every person's life even consciously or unconsciously. Issue of choosing or determining individuals who has the talent on music is mostly faced at aptitude tests. Musical…

Performance on a range of spatial and mathematics tasks was measured in a sample of 1592 students in kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. In a previously published analysis of these data, performance was analyzed by grade only. In the present analyses, we examined whether the relations between spatial skill and mathematics skill differed…

There is now wide consensus that the quality of family relationships is involved in the development of child executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills that bear critical importance for social and academic adjustment at school. This body of research has, however, focused almost exclusively on dyadic parent-child interactions and failed…

Educators and several national standards highlight the role that problem solving should play in students' mathematics education: problem solving is recognized as one of the most significant activities of doing mathematics. From the research point of view, nowadays, it is well established that cognitive and affective factors come into play in…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

Despite the importance of handwriting for school readiness and early academic progress, prior research on the development of handwriting has focused primarily on the product rather than the process by which young children write letters. In contrast, in the present work, early handwriting is viewed as involving a suite of perceptual, motor, and…

Mathematics professor Julie Cwikla decided that she needed to investigate young children's understandings and see what precurricular partitioning notions young minds bring to the fraction table. Cwikla realized that only a handful of studies have examined how preschool-age and early elementary school-age students solve fraction problems (Empson…

In an effort to understand cognitive foundations of oral language comprehension (i.e., listening comprehension), we examined how inhibitory control, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring are uniquely related to listening comprehension over and above vocabulary and age. A total of 156 children in kindergarten and first grade from…

In an effort to understand cognitive foundations of oral language comprehension (i.e., listening comprehension), we examined how inhibitory control, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring are uniquely related to listening comprehension over and above vocabulary and age. A total of 156 children in kindergarten and first grade from…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

We conducted 3 studies to explore cultural differences in global versus local processing and their developmental trajectories. In Study 1 ("N" = 363), we found that Japanese college students were less globally oriented in their processing than American or Argentine participants. We replicated this effect in Study 2 ("N" =…

Despite numerous studies, the link between verbal working memory (WM) and calculation abilities remains poorly understood. The present longitudinal study focuses specifically on the role of serial order retention capacities, based on recent findings suggesting a link between ordinal processing in verbal WM and numerical processing tasks. Children…

Previous research suggests that 3-year-olds fail to learn from statistical data when their prior beliefs conflict with evidence. Are children's beliefs entrenched in their folk theories, or can preschoolers rationally update their beliefs? Motivated by a Bayesian account, we conducted a training study to investigate this question. Children (45…

Executive control (EC) is related to mathematics performance in middle childhood. However, little is known regarding how EC and informal numeracy differentially support mathematics skill acquisition in preschoolers. A sample of preschoolers (115 girls, 113 boys), stratified by social risk, completed an EC task battery at 3 years, informal numeracy…