Increasingly, cognitive developmental researchers are forming partnerships with museums as a way to achieve both overlapping and distinctive goals. Such partnerships can further our understanding of cognitive development by providing opportunities to study children's learning within social contexts. At the same time, these collaborations can…

Existing data sets can be an efficient, powerful, and readily available resource for addressing questions about developmental science. Many of the available databases contain hundreds of variables of interest to developmental psychologists, track participants longitudinally, and have representative samples. In this article, the authors discuss the…

Eye tracking offers a powerful research tool for developmental scientists. In this brief article, the author introduces the methodology and issues associated with its applications in developmental research, beginning with an overview of eye movements and eye-tracking technologies, followed by examples of how it is used to study the developing mind…

Cognitive development is a cultural process. More experienced cultural members and the practices, institutions, and artifacts of the culture provide support and guidance for children as they develop knowledge and thinking skills. In this article, the authors describe the value that is added to our understanding of cognitive development when…

Habituation of looking time has become the standard method for studying cognitive processes in infancy. This method has a long history and derives from the study of memory and habituation itself. Often, however, it is not clear how researchers make decisions about how to implement habituation as a tool to study processes such as categorization,…

The 3D cube figures used by Shepard and Metzler [Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). "Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects." "Science," 171, 701-703] have been applied in a broad range of studies on mental rotation. This note provides a brief background on these figures, their general use in cognitive psychology and their role in…

This study examined the behaviors and experiences of students who needed assistance while working in peer-directed small groups on mathematics problems and the processes that helped or hindered their learning. Students in 4 seventh-grade classes worked in heterogeneous small groups throughout a 3-week unit on operations with decimal numbers.…

Recent methodological advances have allowed researchers to address confounds in the measurement of task-switch costs in task-switching performance by dissociating cue switching from task switching. For example, in the transition-cuing procedure, which involves presenting cues for task transitions rather than for tasks, cue transitions (cue…

There have been multiple reports over the last 3 decades that stimulus quality and word frequency have additive effects on the time to make a lexical decision. However, it is surprising that there is only 1 published report to date that has investigated the joint effects of these two factors in the context of reading aloud, and the outcome of that…

Undergraduates (n=99) differing in spatial ability were tested on problems involving the mental rotation of familiar alphanumeric stimuli and unfamiliar stimuli drawn from the Primary Mental Abilities Space Test. Individual differences in spatial ability were associated with speed rather than accuracy of mental rotation processes. Ability…