Adolescence is a period of profound change, which holds substantial developmental milestones, but also unique challenges to the individual. In this opinion paper, we highlight the potential of combining two recently developed behavioural and neural training techniques (cognitive bias modification and functional magnetic neuroimaging-based…

Interactions between evolutionary psychologists and developmental systems theorists have been largely antagonistic. This is unfortunate because potential synergies between the two approaches remain unexplored. This article presents a method that may help to bridge the divide, and that has proven fruitful in biology: dynamic optimization. Dynamic…

Alteration of the organization of social and motivational neuroanatomical circuitry must have been an essential step in the evolution of human language. Development of vocal communication across species, particularly birdsong, and new research on the neural organization and evolution of social and motivational circuitry, together suggest that…

Barth and Paladino (2011) argue that changes in numerical representations are better modeled by a power function whose exponent gradually rises to 1 than as a shift from a logarithmic to a linear representation of numerical magnitude. However, the fit of the power function to number line estimation data may simply stem from fitting noise generated…

The role of community in child and adolescent development is emerging as a significant area of theoretical inquiry, research, and application. This article describes the development and utilization of a comprehensive community change effort designed to increase the attention of all community members toward strengthening core developmental…

Youth development lost a pioneer and a champion, Peter Benson, in October. Benson was a pioneer whose ideas mattered and a champion of approaches to research and its use in the community that has made a difference around the world. Benson's work, life, and spirit have helped transform people's understanding of young people, what it takes to…

Despite the advances in understanding cognitive improvements in executive function in adolescence, much less is known about the influence of affective and social modulators on executive function and the biological underpinnings of these functions and sensitivities. Here, recent behavioral and neuroscientific studies are summarized that have used…

Schools may be able to play a particular role in instilling a strong American identity in young people. They can do this by actively practicing democratic community within the school. This practice of democratic community is key to the development of an individual identity that prioritizes the interdependent relationship between individual and…

The timeliness of civic education for American youth is discussed. Particular attention is given to the history of calls for civic education, the state of civic education in schools today, particularly those serving youth in disadvantaged contexts, and the specific ways in which schools can better address the civic education needs of contemporary…

How do capuchin monkeys learn to use stones to crack open nuts? Perception-action theory posits that individuals explore producing varying spatial and force relations among objects and surfaces, thereby learning about affordances of such relations and how to produce them. Such learning supports the discovery of tool use. We present longitudinal…

Three-year-olds were given a search task with conflicting cues about the target's location. A ball rolled behind a transparent screen and stopped behind one of four opaque doors mounted into the screen. A wall that protruded above one door provided a visible cue of blockage in the ball's path, while the transparent screen allowed visual tracking…

Forty toddlers aged 20 to 24 months were presented with 32 pairs of images with the auditory stimulus Look followed by the name of the target image (e.g. "Look...tree") in an intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. The same series of 16 items was presented first with one image as target and then with the other member of the pair as target.…

The use of self-organizing feature maps (SOFM) in models of cognitive development has frequently been associated with explanations of "critical" or "sensitive periods". By contrast, error-driven connectionist models of development have been linked with "catastrophic interference" between new knowledge and old knowledge. We introduce a set of…

In this paper we consider the perceptual and conceptual contributions that shape early word learning, using research on the "shape bias" as a case in point. In our view, conceptual, linguistic, social-pragmatic, and perceptual sources of information influence one another powerfully and continuously in the service of word learning throughout…

Young children's skilled generalization of newly learned nouns to new instances has become the battleground for two very different approaches to cognition. This debate is a proxy for a larger dispute in cognitive science and cognitive development: cognition as rule-like amodal propositions, on the one hand, or as embodied, modal, and dynamic…