For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

Children show less positivity toward gender-nonconforming (GN) than gender-conforming (GC) peers. Yet, little is known about children's reasoning about peers of varying gender expressions, including age-, gender-, and culture-related influences. We investigated how children aged 4- to 5- and 8- to 9-years-old in Hong Kong and Canada (N = 678)…

In pursuing goals, people seek favorable odds. We investigated whether young children use this fact to infer goals from people's actions across two experiments on Canadian 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 316; 167 girls, 149 boys). Participants' demographic information was not formally collected, but the region is predominantly middle-class and…

Objective: Physical activity (PA) is essential to promote both optimal physical and emotional health in preschool children. Hence, well-founded PA guidelines are essential. 24-hour Movement Guidelines (which include PA, recreational screen time and sleep) have been established. Thus, this study aimed to explore preschool-aged children's adherence…

Solo performance is a common experience for children learning to play an instrument, yet the research literature on these experiences is limited, with a focus on older children and adolescents. The purpose of this study was to examine younger children's feelings about performance over the course of a year of study. Forty-one children were…

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…

Why do some children feel happy about violating ethical norms whereas others feel guilty? This study examined whether children's attention to two types of competing cues during hypothetical transgressions related to their subsequent emotions. Eye tracking was used to test whether attending to other-oriented cues (i.e., a victim's face) versus…

Given the value placed on honesty and the negative consequences of lying, encouraging children's truth-telling is important. The present investigation assessed honesty promotion techniques for encouraging 3-8-year-old Canadian children's (Study 1: n = 301, 54% female; Study 2: n = 229, 50% female from predominantly White middle-class samples)…

Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about…

HIV-exposed uninfected (HEU) children during the preschool and early school ages may be at-risk for neurodevelopmental challenges due to in utero and perinatal exposure to HIV and/or antiretroviral (ARV) medications. HEU children and HIV-unexposed uninfected (HUU) children from the community were recruited and tested at 3 to 4 and 5 to 6 years of…

Purpose: Past research shows that parentally responsive behavior toward the child positively influences language development in both neurotypical children and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including those with fragile X syndrome (FXS); however, most studies have focused exclusively on the mother--child relationship.…

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

The present study investigated family quality of life (FQOL) as experienced by 493 mothers and fathers (295 families) of young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prior to receiving early intervention services in the province of Québec. These families were most satisfied with their physical and material well-being and least satisfied with…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

"Weight-related attitudes" refer to negative attitudes toward individuals because they are overweight or obese. These attitudes are widespread among children and adults and have been proven to be recalcitrant to intervention. To develop more effective interventions, it is necessary to understand the origin and development of explicit and…