How does cognitive control change with age, and what are the processes underlying these changes? This question has been extensively studied using versions of the task-switching paradigm, which allow participants to actively prepare for the upcoming task (Kray, Eber, & Karbach, 2008). Little is known, however, about age-related changes in this…

This large-scale study examined the development of time-based prospective memory (PM) across childhood and the roles that working memory updating and time monitoring play in driving age effects in PM performance. One hundred and ninety-seven children aged 5 to 14 years completed a time-based PM task where working memory updating load was…

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…

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the…

Learning of the mathematical number line has been hypothesized to be dependent on an inherent sense of approximate quantity. Children's number line placements are predicted to conform to the underlying properties of this system; specifically, placements are exaggerated for small numerals and compressed for larger ones. Alternative hypotheses…

Information flows continuously in the environment. As we attempt to do something, our senses receive large volumes of information. In any conversation, messages are exchanged rapidly. To understand meaning, we have to focus, record, choose and process relevant information at every moment, before it is displaced by other information. Often,…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

In line with the frontal hypothesis of aging, the ability to plan ahead undergoes substantial change during normal aging. Although impairments on the Tower of London planning task were reported earlier, associations between age-related declines and specific cognitive demands on planning have not been studied. Here we investigated the impact of…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterised by a unique pattern of preserved abilities and deficits within and across cognitive domains. The Complex Information Processing Theory proposes this pattern reflects an altered capacity to respond to cognitive demands. This study compared how complexity induced by time constraints on processing…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

In simple rule-switching tests, 3- and 4-year-olds can follow each of two sorting rules but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g., inhibition). However, they might also reflect…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

In light of the adult model of a hemispheric asymmetry of global and local processing, we compared children (M [subscript age] = 8.4 years) to adults in a global-local reaction time (RT) paradigm. Hierarchical designs (large shapes made of small shapes) were presented randomly to each visual field, and participants were instructed to identify…

Purpose: In the current study, the author aimed to determine whether 4- to 6-year-old typically developing children possess requisite problem-solving and language abilities to produce, generalize, and retain a novel verb inflection when taught using an explicit, deductive teaching procedure. Method: Study participants included a cross-sectional…