Previous research demonstrates that both child maltreatment and intellectual performance contribute uniquely to the accurate identification of facial affect by children and adolescents. The purpose of this study was to extend this research by examining whether child maltreatment affects the accuracy of facial recognition differently at varying…

This study investigated the development of working memory ability (measured by tasks assessing all four working memory components) from the end of kindergarten to the end of first grade--the first year reading is taught in school--and the relationship between working memory abilities in kindergarten and first grade and reading skills in first…

Selective sustained attention (SSA) is crucial for higher order cognition. Factors promoting SSA are described as exogenous or endogenous. However, there is little research specifying how these factors interact during development, due largely to the paucity of developmentally appropriate paradigms. We report findings from a novel paradigm designed…

The primary aim of this study was to assess the development of action planning in a group of typically developing children aged 3 to 10 years (N = 351). The second aim was to assess reliability of the action planning task and to relate the results of the action planning task to results of validated upper limb motor performance tests. Participants…

The links among social information processing, social competence, and school readiness were examined in this short-term longitudinal study with a sample of 198 preschool children. Data on social information processing were obtained via child interview, data on child social competence were obtained via teacher report, and data on school readiness…

The first years of life are witness to rapid changes in long-term recall ability. In the current research we contributed to an explanation of the changes by testing the absolute and relative contributions to long-term recall of encoding and post-encoding processes. Using elicited imitation, we sampled the status of 16-, 20-, and 24-month-old…

Two studies were conducted to examine theoretical questions about children's and adults' memory for emotional visual stimuli. In Study 1, 7- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 172) participated in the initial creation of the Developmental Affective Photo System (DAPS). Ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and complexity were obtained. In Study 2,…

Recent studies have shown that in situations where resources have been acquired collaboratively, children at around 3 years of age share mostly equally. We investigated 3-year-olds' sharing behavior with a collaborating partner and a free-riding partner who explicitly expressed her preference not to collaborate. Children shared more equally with…

Preschoolers persistently predict that they will perform better than they actually can perform on a picture recall task. The current investigation sought to explore a condition under which young children might be able to improve their predictive accuracy. Namely, children were asked to predict their recall twice for the same set of items.…

Research has shown that victims of bullying fare less well on measures of peer affiliation than nonvictims, but less is known about the direction of effects and the mechanisms involved. Three linked studies addressed the latter two issues using an experimental paradigm with hypothetical vignettes (N = 360). In Experiment 1, among both boys and…

The ability to read opens up the possibility of learning about the world indirectly via print sources, providing a powerful new opportunity for children who have for years learned effectively from what people tell them. We compared children's trust in printed versus oral information. We also examined whether children who showed preferential trust…

Humans rely on two main systems of quantification; one is nonsymbolic and involves approximate number representations (known as the approximate number system or ANS), and the other is symbolic and allows for exact calculations of number. Despite the pervasiveness of the ANS across development, recent studies with adolescents and school-aged…

This research investigates how early learning about native language sound structure affects how infants associate sounds with meanings during word learning. Infants (19-month-olds) were presented with bisyllabic labels with high or low phonotactic probability (i.e., sequences of frequent or infrequent phonemes in English). The labels were produced…

The objective of this study was to describe the developmental progression of counterfactual reasoning from childhood to adulthood. In contrast to the traditional view, it was recently reported by Rafetseder and colleagues that even a majority of 6-year-old children do not engage in counterfactual reasoning when asked counterfactual questions…

In this study, the performance of typically developing 6- to 8-year-old children on an approximate number discrimination task, a symbolic comparison task, and a symbolic and nonsymbolic number line estimation task was examined. For the first time, children's performances on these basic cognitive number processing tasks were explicitly contrasted…