Learning how to write involves the automation of grapho-motor skills. One of the factors that determine automaticity is "motor anticipation." This is the ability to write a letter while processing information on how to produce following letters. It is essential for writing fast and smoothly. We investigated how motor anticipation…

Two main theoretical constructs seek to describe the elaborated sense of time that may be a uniquely human attribute: diachronic thinking (the ability to think about the past and use that information to predict future events) and event ordering (the ability to sequence events in temporal order). Researchers utilize various tasks to measure the…

This study aimed to compare children's performance on two mnemonic functions that engage the lateral prefrontal cortex. Brain imaging studies in adults have shown that the mid-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is specifically involved in active controlled retrieval, and the mid-dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is specifically involved in…

Studies investigating imitation are usually conducted with adult models in Western contexts; therefore, the influence of cultural context and the model's age on infants' imitation is largely unknown. This study assessed deferred imitation in 9-month-old infants from the German middle-class ("N" = 44) and the ethnic group of Nso…

The present investigation examined whether school-aged children and adolescents' own deceptive behavior of cheating and lying influenced their honesty judgments of their same-aged peers. Eighty 8- to 17-year-olds who had previously participated in a study examining cheating and lie-telling behaviors were invited to make honesty judgments of…

The components of children's trust in same-gender peers (trust beliefs, ascribed trustworthiness, and dyadic reciprocal trust) were examined in samples of 8-11-year-olds from the UK, Italy, and Japan. Trust was assessed by children's ratings of the extent to which same-gender classmates kept promises and kept secrets. Social relations…

Children may be capable of understanding the value of emotion regulation strategies before they can enlist these strategies in emotion-evoking situations. This study was designed to extend understanding of children's judgment of the efficacy of alternative emotion regulation strategies. Children aged six and nine ("N" = 97) were…

The ability to infer the emotional states of others is central to our everyday interactions. These inferences can be drawn from several different sources of information occurring simultaneously in the communication situation. Based on previous studies revealing that children pay more heed to situational context than to emotional prosody when…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

Parenting research is frequently conducted without a thorough examination of socio-economic characteristics. In this study, longitudinal observations of positive parenting were conducted across six time points. Participants were 219 mothers of children with and without developmental delays. Mothers' positive parenting increased during early…

Children adopted from institutions at older ages are at increased risk of persistent attention problems, lower cognition, and academic difficulties. This study examined cognitive and behavior problems as mediators of the association between early psychosocial deprivation and academic functioning. Participants were 8-17-year-old children adopted…

Two hundred and twenty two children (104 females), 1-8 years of age and young adults, were tested for up to 25 days on five versions of a non-verbal, non-navigational landmark task that had previously been used for monkeys. In monkeys, performance on this task is severely impaired following damage to the parietal cortex. For the basic task, the…

Sensitivity to spacing information within faces improves with age and reaches maturity only at adolescence. In this study, we tested 6-16-year-old children's sensitivity to vertical spacing when the eyes or the mouth is the facial feature selectively manipulated. Despite the similar discriminability of these manipulations when they are…

In this article, we review, on three grounds, the nature of the life story. First, we evaluate the appropriateness of the proposal that the life story emerges in adolescence (the time of the traditional identity crisis). Second, we examine the relation between big stories (of which the life story is one) and small stories. Finally, we consider…

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…