We tested children in Grades 1 to 5, as well as college students, on a number line estimation task and examined latencies and errors to explore the cognitive processes involved in estimation. The developmental trends in estimation were more consistent with the hypothesized shift from logarithmic to linear representation than with an account based…

Studies have suggested that proper postural control is essential for the development of reaching. However, little research has examined the development of the coordination between posture and manual control throughout childhood. We investigated the coordination between posture and manual control in children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults during…

Prior research has documented that Japanese children's performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task can be influenced by their observation of another person completing the task, which is referred to as social transmission of disinhibition. The current study explored whether Canadian children would also show a social transmission…

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability to reading development in 142 English-speaking children from the start of kindergarten to the middle of Grade 2. Partial cross-lagged analyses revealed significant relationships between early performance on block design and…

A comprehensive working memory battery and tests of mathematical skills were administered to 90 children--41 in Year 1 (5-6 years of age) and 49 in Year 3 (7-8 years of age). Working memory could explain statistically significant variance in number writing, magnitude judgment, and single-digit arithmetic, but the different components of working…

This longitudinal study examined the concurrent and predictive relations between executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) in 82 preschoolers who were assessed when they were 2, 3, and 4 years old. The results showed that the concurrent relation between EF and ToM, after controlling for age, verbal ability, and sex, was significant at 3 and…

The current research compared the ability of adults and children to determine where another person is looking in shared visual space (triadic gaze). In Experiment 1, children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults viewed photographs of a model fixating a series of positions separated by 1.6 degrees along the horizontal plane. The task was to…

The purpose of this study was to explore individual patterns of strengths and weaknesses in children's mathematical knowledge about common fractions. Tasks that primarily measure either conceptual or procedural aspects of mathematical knowledge were assessed with the same children in their fourth- and fifth-grade years (N = 181, 56% female and 44%…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the accuracy of parents' perception of children's reaching limits in a risk scenario. A sample of 68 parents of 1- to 4-year-olds were asked to make a prior estimate of their children's behavior and action limits in a task that involved retrieving a toy out of the water. The action modes used for…

Previous studies failed to find evidence for rational action selection in children under 2 years of age. The current study investigated whether younger children required more training to encode the relevant causal relationships. Children between 1 1/2 and 3 years of age were trained over two sessions to perform actions on a touch-sensitive screen…

The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body…

We examined the ability of young infants (3- and 4-month-olds) to detect faces in the two-tone images often referred to as Mooney faces. In Experiment 1, this performance was examined in conditions of high and low visibility of local features and with either the presence or absence of the outer head contour. We found that regardless of the…

Long-term recall is influenced by what originally was encoded as well as by the efficacy of retrieval processes. The possible explanatory role of post-encoding processes by which initially labile memory traces are stabilized and integrated into long-term memory (i.e., consolidated) has received relatively less research attention. In the current…

We studied the acquisition of the ordinal meaning of number words and examined its development relative to the acquisition of the cardinal meaning. Three groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were tested in two tasks requiring the use of number words in both cardinal and ordinal contexts. Understanding of the counting principles was also…

Three studies assessed parent-child agreement in perceptions of children's everyday emotions in typically developing 4- to 11-year-old children. Study 1 (N = 228) and Study 2 (N = 195) focused on children's worry and anxiety. Study 3 (N = 90) examined children's optimism. Despite child and parent reporters providing internally consistent…