Without criteria for what counts as a U/N-shaped developmental trajectory, it is not clear how many legitimate "Us" really exist. Many, if not all, "Us" may turn out to be illusions borne out of our sampling methods, task construal, and blurry lenses of description. (Contains 2 figures.)

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…

Rakison and Yermolayeva (this issue) argue that domain specificity is difficult to reconcile with U-, N-, or M-shaped developmental trends. They are justified because: (1) There is no compelling evidence that nonlinear trends require mechanisms beyond general, well-known cognitive processes; and (2) epigenetic neuroscience provides no clear…

In this study the authors examined children's ability to code visual information into an egocentric frame of reference for planning reach movements. Children and adults estimated reach distance via motor imagery in immediate and response-delay conditions. Actual maximum reach was compared to estimates in multiple locations in peripersonal and…

Research suggests that executive function (EF) may distinguish between children who are well- or ill-prepared for kindergarten; however, little is known about the test-retest reliability of measures of EF for children. We aimed to establish a battery of EF measures that are sensitive to both development and individual differences across the…

A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…

There is a growing list of examples illustrating that infants are transitioning from having earlier abilities that appear more "universal," "broadly tuned," or "unconstrained" to having later abilities that appear more "specialized," "narrowly tuned," or "constrained." Perceptual narrowing, a well-known phenomenon related to face, speech, and…

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that information about intergroup competition is central to children's representations of social categories. Children (N = 99, 5- and 6-year-olds) were introduced to two novel social categories, which were described as having competing or noncompeting goals, by varying the quantity of a resource in…

In this study the authors investigated whether training preschool children in the use of mental state lexicon plays a significant role in bringing about advanced conceptual understanding of mental terms and improved performance on theory-of-mind tasks. A total of 70 participants belonging to two age groups (3 and 4 years old) were randomly…

Young children spontaneously engage in a variety of one-to-one correspondence activities during play. The present study tested whether one of these activities--pairing objects with containers--supported the development of numerical equivalence judgments. Three-year-olds were given sets of toys to take home. In one condition, the toys were…

Developmental cognitive neuroscience is a rapidly growing field that examines the relationships between biological development and cognitive ability. In the past decade, there has been ongoing refinement of concepts and methodology related to the study of "functional connectivity" among distributed brain regions believed to underlie cognition and…

In this research, we examined overall performance and gender differences in measurement skills in elementary-school students from low-income families. In Study 1, accuracy and error patterns were analyzed in a large sample of fourth-graders; in Study 2 error patterns and strategy usage were examined with a smaller sample of fourth-graders. Study 1…

The examination of alternative hypotheses can initiate students into scientific practices and equip them with scientific literacy skills that will help them participate in ongoing debates involving complex socio-scientific problems. Hypothesis testing, in which the examination of alternative hypotheses is situated, has received much attention in…

An important element of adaptive expertise involves stepping away from a routine to retool one's knowledge or environment. The current study investigated two forms of this adaptive pattern: fault-driven adaptations, which are reactions to a difficulty, and prospective adaptations, which are proactive reformulations. Graduate and undergraduate…

This article challenges a recent proposal for the theoretical interpretation of L1 and L2 interaction that results from the abrupt change of language environment in internationally adopted children. According to this proposal (Pallier, Dehaene, Poline, LeBihan, Argenti, Depoux and Mehler, 2003; Ventureyra, Pallier and Yoo, 2004), such children…