Low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with greater risk for symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One mechanism through which SES may confer risk for ADHD is by influencing brain structure. Alterations to cortical thickness, surface area and subcortical volume have been associated with low SES and with the presence of…

The widely and internationally replicated socioeconomic status (SES) gradient of executive function (EF) implies that intervention approaches may do well to extrapolate conditions and practices from contexts that generate better child outcomes (in this case, higher SES circumstances) and translate these to contexts with comparatively poorer…

A well-established literature demonstrates executive function (EF) deficits in obese children and adults relative to healthy weight comparisons. EF deficits in obesity are associated with overeating and impulsive consumption of high calorie foods leading to excess weight gain and to problems with metabolic regulation and low-grade inflammation…

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and…

When we watch movies, we consider the characters' mental states in order to understand and predict the narrative. Recent work in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uses movie-viewing paradigms to measure functional responses in brain regions recruited for such mental state reasoning (the theory of mind ["ToM"] network). Here,…

There is an ongoing debate whether phonological deficits in dyslexics should be attributed to (a) less specified representations of speech sounds, like suggested by studies in young children with a familial risk for dyslexia, or (b) to an impaired access to these phonemic representations, as suggested by studies in adults with dyslexia. These…

This longitudinal study investigates whether the development in executive control and bilingual experience predicts change in language control in bilingual children. Children were tested twice over the course of 1 year, using the language-switching paradigm and the Simon task. The participants were Japanese-English bilingual "returnee"…

Studies of children's developing social identification often focus on individual forms of identity. Yet, everyone has multiple potential identities. Here we investigated whether making children aware of their multifaceted identities--effectively seeing themselves from multiple angles--would promote their flexible thinking. In Experiment 1, 6- to…

What aspects of infants' prelinguistic communication are most valuable for learning to speak, and why? We test whether early vocalizations and gestures drive the transition to word use because, in addition to indicating motoric readiness, they (a) are early instances of intentional communication and (b) elicit verbal responses from caregivers. In…

Combining information across different sensory modalities is of critical importance for the animal's survival and a core feature of human's everyday life. In adulthood, sensory information is often integrated in a statistically optimal fashion, so that the combined estimates of two or more senses are more reliable than the best single one. Several…

Exposure to early psychosocial deprivation as a result of institutional care disrupts typical brain development. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) is the first longitudinal study to investigate the neurodevelopment of institutionalized infants randomized to a foster care (FCG) intervention versus care as usual (CAUG). Here, we…

The current study examined the influence of observing another's lie- or truth-telling -- and its consequences -- on children's own honesty about a transgression. Children (N = 224, 5-8 years of age) observed an experimenter (E) tell the truth or lie about a minor transgression in one of five conditions: (a) Truth-Positive Outcome -- E told the…

A long-standing debate in the field of numerical cognition concerns the degree to which symbolic and non-symbolic processing are related over the course of development. Of particular interest is the possibility that this link depends on the range of quantities in question. Behavioral and neuroimaging research with adults suggests that symbolic and…

Research demonstrating that infants discriminate between small (e.g., 1 vs. 3 dots) and large numerosities (e.g., 8 vs. 16 dots) is central to theories concerning the origins of human numerical abilities. To date, there has been no quantitative meta-analysis of the infant numerical competency data. Here, we quantitatively synthesize the evidential…

The shape bias, a preference for mapping new word labels onto the shape rather than the color or texture of referents, has been postulated as a word-learning mechanism. Previous research has shown deficits in the shape bias in children with autism even though they acquire sizeable lexicons. While previous explanations have suggested the atypical…