Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with adults provide evidence that functional brain networks, including the default mode network and frontoparietal network, underlie executive functioning (EF). However, given the challenges of using fMRI with infants and young children, little work has assessed the developmental trajectories of…

High-quality communicative interactions between caregivers and children provide a foundation for children's social and cognitive skills. Although most studies examining these types of interactions focus on child language outcomes, this paper takes another tack. It examines whether communicative, dyadic interactions might also relate to child…

Children learn words in environments where there is considerable variability, both in terms of the number of possible referents for novel words, and the availability of cues to support word-referent mappings. How caregivers adapt their gestural cues to referential uncertainty has not yet been explored. We tested a computational model of…

Episodic memory involves binding together what-where-when associations. In three experiments, we tested the development of memory for such contextual associations in a naturalistic setting. Children searched for toys in two rooms with two different experimenters; each room contained two identical sets of four containers, but arranged differently.…

Core knowledge theories advocate the primacy of fundamental principles that constrain cognitive development from early infancy. However, there is concern that core knowledge of object properties does not constrain older preschoolers' reasoning during manual search. Here we address in detail both failure and success on two well-established search…

Iconicity--resemblance between a symbol and its referent--has long been presumed to facilitate symbolic insight and symbol use in infancy. These two experiments test children's ability to recognize iconic gestures at ages 14 through 26 months. The results indicate a clear ability to recognize how a gesture resembles its referent by 26 months, but…

Forty-two children participated in a longitudinal study that investigated the relationship between their joint engagement experience when toddlers and their development of theory of mind when preschoolers. Controlling for language comprehension at 30 months, higher preschool false belief scores were associated with more time in coordinated joint…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that toddlers have access to an analog-magnitude number representation that supports numerical reasoning about relatively large numbers. Three-year-olds were presented with subtraction problems in which initial set size and proportions subtracted were systematically varied. Two sets of cookies…

Face recognition impairments are well documented in older children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD); however, the developmental course of the deficit is not clear. This study investigates the progressive specialization of face recognition skills in children with and without ASD. Experiment 1 examines human and monkey face recognition in…

An important source of information about a new word's meaning (and its associated lexical class) is its range of reference: the number of objects to which it is extended. Ninety toddlers (mean age = 37 months) participated in a study to determine whether young children can use this information in word learning. When a novel word was presented with…