Research in developmental psychology requires sampling at different time points. Accurate depictions of developmental change provide a foundation for further empirical studies and theories about developmental mechanisms. However, overreliance on widely spaced sampling intervals in cross-sectional and longitudinal designs threatens the validity of…

According to the dual criterion account of early linguistic judgment (Merriman & Lipko, 2008), preschool-aged children who possess more efficient object memory processes should also be more accurate judges of whether various objects have known names. In support of this claim, both the accuracy of object recognition and the speed of object naming…

A growing number of studies suggests cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggests that Westerners typically…

Previous studies (Case, 1985; Siegler, 1981) have shown that children under the age of 5 years have little understanding of balance scales when required to encode the influence of weight or distance from the fulcrum. More recently, however, Halford, Andrews, Dalton, Boag, and Zielinski (2002) noted that an understanding based on weight alone is…

In this study, the authors assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that explicitly denied, explicitly…

The ability to recognize common objects from sparse information about geometric shape emerges during the same period in which children learn object names and object categories. Hummel and Biederman's (1992) theory of object recognition proposes that the geometric shapes of objects have two components--geometric volumes representing major object…

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…