There is growing interest among educational researchers in using heart rate variability (HRV) as an index of children's capacity to regulate their physiological arousal. Links between HRV and young children's self-regulation have, however, been inconsistent, and there is limited research on children's HRV in learning-related contexts. HRV was…

Question-explanation exchanges in parent-child interactions foster children's early learning, especially when children are inquiring about unobservable scientific phenomena such as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). As with other unobservable entities, children must rely on adults to acquire knowledge about COVID-19. Yet, we know very little about…

Educational interventions are frequently designed to occur during early childhood, based on the idea that earlier intervention will have greater long-term academic benefits. However, surprisingly little is known about when cognitive and academic skills are most plastic, or malleable, during development. One way to study plasticity is to ask…

PlayWisely is a novel approach to early learning designed to target the positive development of a wide range of cognitive and physical/motor abilities by stimulating the rapidly developing brain of very young children (from 4 months to 3 years of age). The current pilot study represents a first step toward providing an evidence base for the…

We examined interactions between baseline hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity in relation to executive functions (EF) in a sample (n = 1,005) of children in low wealth, nonurban communities at age 48 months. Salivary cortisol and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) represented baseline HPA…

Prior research has demonstrated that linguistic skills and knowledge contribute to successful reading acquisition. In contrast, little is known about the influence of domain-general learning abilities on reading. To investigate associations between general memory functions and reading during the early stages of learning to read, performance…

This exploratory study investigated behavioral and neural correlates of spatial reasoning in 21 children aged 6-12 years-old during educational video game play. Behavioral measures included child performance in learning the concept during the pretest, practice, and posttest portions of the game. Neural correlates using electroencephalography…

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of…

In three studies, we examined children's geography learning from a physical puzzle and an app designed to mimic the puzzle. In Study 1, 5- and 6-year-olds were taught Australia's states by an experimenter using a puzzle or were taught by an app. Children learned significantly more states from instruction with the puzzle than when they used the app…

Extreme poverty all over the world is concentrated in rural settings. However, studies about cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part conducted in urban populations. This paper investigates, in a poor rural sample, what are the individual and socioenvironmental variables that make the difference in performance in…

The purpose of the current pilot study was to examine the effects of a teacher-designed and teacher-led numerical board game intervention. Fifty-four 4- to 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to either the number board game intervention or an active control group. Relative to the control group, children who received the number game intervention…

What is the nature of the relationship between different lower-level numerical skills and their role in developing arithmetic skills? We consider the hypothesis of a reciprocal relationship between the development of symbolic (e.g., Arabic numerals) and nonsymbolic (e.g., arrays of objects) numerical magnitude processing. Evidence for…

Young children have better math abilities when their parents engage in more math-related conversations with them. Yet, previous studies have found that math talk occurs only very infrequently in everyday interactions. In the present study, we sought to promote adult-child conversations about math in a naturalistic context using minimal…

Spatial skills are consistently linked to mathematical reasoning, and are sensitive to intervention. One important spatial skill is spatial scaling. We evaluated whether (1) a playful scaling game might promote learning by providing feedback during play, and (2) spatial scaling is related to number-line estimation (NLE) based on the mutual…

The purpose of the present study was to develop and evaluate a scale to measure adaptive behavior skills in Chinese children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants were 121 young children (M = 55.18 months, SD = 0.18 months) with a formal diagnosis of ASD (73% male). Psychometric evaluation indicated that the reliability and validity of…