There is mounting empirical evidence to suggest that adults are intuitively cooperative. When presented with a cooperative dilemma between self-maximizing and benefitting the common good, decisions made quickly are more likely to be cooperative, whereas slow decisions tend to favor self-interest. To investigate the ontogenetic origins of intuitive…

Attending to distracting or competing information is typically considered detrimental to learning, but the presence of competing information can also facilitate learning when it is relevant to ongoing task goals. Educational settings often contain contextual elements such as classroom decorations or visual aids to enhance student learning. Despite…

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus and colleagues from 1999, which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, 7-month-old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we…

Initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in predominantly White contexts, including STEM fields, have primarily relied on approaches to increase the representation of minoritized individuals. However, an increase in the representation of minoritized individuals is only one step of the process, as the present study suggests that…

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…

Everyone agrees that infants possess general mechanisms for learning about the world, but the existence and operation of more specialized mechanisms is controversial. One mechanism--rule learning--has been proposed as potentially specific to speech, based on findings that 7-month-olds can learn abstract repetition rules from spoken syllables (e.g.…

Children's abilities to regulate their behaviors are critical for learning and development, yet researchers lack an objective, precise method for assessing children's behavioral regulation in their everyday environments such as their classrooms. This study tested a sensor-based approach to assess preschool children's behavioral regulation…

Studies on children's understanding of counting examine when and how children acquire the cardinal principle: the idea that the last word in a counted set reflects the cardinal value of the set. Using Wynn's (1990) Give-N Task, researchers classify children who can count to generate large sets as having acquired the cardinal principle…

For many years, researchers studied executive functions (EFs) in the laboratory with a focus on understanding an individual child's development and brain processes in a controlled environment. Building on this foundational research, there is a growing interest in EFs in the context of a child's dynamic, social world, and the contextual and…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…

Infants in low-resource settings are at heightened risk for compromised cognitive development due to a multitude of environmental insults in their surroundings. However, the onset of adverse outcomes and trajectory of cognitive development in these settings is not well understood. The aims of the present study were to adapt the Mullen Scales of…

Sensitive caregiving is an essential aspect of positive parenting that influences executive functions development, but the mechanisms underlying this association are less clear. Using data from the Family Life Project, a large prospective longitudinal sample of 1292 families residing in rural, predominately low-income communities, the current…

Conversational turn-taking is a complex communicative skill that requires both linguistic and executive functioning (EF) skills, including processing input while simultaneously forming and inhibiting responses until one's turn. Adult-child turn-taking predicts children's linguistic, cognitive, and socioemotional development. However, little is…

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) of visual items is a powerful predictor of reading skills. However, the direction and locus of the association between RAN and reading is still largely unclear. Here, we investigated whether literacy acquisition directly bolsters RAN efficiency for objects, adopting a strong methodological design, by testing three…

In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…