We leveraged nationally representative data from the Panel study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement (N = 3,562) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal study (N = 18,174), to chart the development of working memory, indexed via verbal forward and backward digit span task performance, from 3 to 19 years of age. Results revealed nonlinear…

Children with autism spectrum disorder have a high risk of vision problems yet little is known about their vision care. This cross-sectional survey study, therefore, examined vision care among 351 children with autism spectrum disorder ages 6-17 years in the United States or Canada who were enrolled in the Autism Treatment Network Registry. Vision…

Background: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) appears more prevalent among children with intellectual disabilities (ID) as compared to children with typical development. However, it remains unclear what drives this difference. Methods: Data from 70 youth with typical development (TD) and 20 youth with ID were drawn from (The Collaborative Family…

Executive functions (EFs) may help children to regulate their food-intake in an "obesogenic" environment, where energy-dense food is easily available. There is mounting evidence that overweight is associated with diminished hot and cool EFs, and several longitudinal studies found evidence for a predictive effect of hot EFs on children's…

Sleep spindles are related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities. However, they undergo drastic maturational changes during adolescence. Here we used a longitudinal approach (across 7 years) to explore whether developmental changes in sleep spindle density can explain individual differences in sleep-dependent…

Decision-making impairments during emerging adulthood confer risk for challenges in social and occupational roles and may increase the odds of developing health problems. Childhood maltreatment is related to maladaptation in cognitive and affective domains (e.g., executive functioning, emotion regulation) implicated in the development of…

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults' perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children's musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether…

Background: Children with language impairment (LI) show heterogeneity in development. We tracked children from pre-school to middle childhood to characterize three developmental trajectories: resolving, persisting and emerging LI. Methods: We analyzed data from children identified as having preschool LI, or being at family risk of dyslexia,…

In this study of two hundred and thirty 8- to 13-year-olds, a new "Silent Films" task is introduced, designed to address the dearth of research on theory of mind in older children by providing a film-based analogue of F. G. E. Happe's (1994) Strange Stories task. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that all items from both tasks loaded…

Background: Deficient vocabulary is a frequently reported symptom of developmental language impairment, but the nature of the deficit and its developmental course are not well documented. Aims: To describe the nature of the deficit in terms of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and to determine whether the nature and the extent of the…

Given that early caregiver concerns may be different for children who go on to receive a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder versus another developmental disability, early caregiver concerns may differ for girls. Using a community-based sample of children (n = 241), we examined the extent to which gender differences may be related to caregiver…

Over half of the children in the U.S. experience adversity early in childhood. These experiences, along with conditions in their families and neighborhoods, have profound developmental effects. The bioecological model of development includes these proximal contexts in a theory of development that incorporates the threats and supports present in…

Background: Individuals with fragile-X syndrome exhibit developmental delay, hyperexcitation and social anxiety; they also show lack of attention and hyperactivity. Few studies have investigated whether levels of functioning change with increasing age. Here, we explored developmental changes across adolescence in the cognitive and behavioural…

Researchers, the authors state, link play to cognitive and affective processes important for a child's development and overall well-being. In this article, the authors examine the relationships involving pretend play, coping, and subjective well-being (the last of which they conceptualize as positive affect--positive mood--and life satisfaction)…

A large-scale ("N" = 552) controlled multivariate prospective 14-year longitudinal study of a developmental cascade embedded in a developmental system showed that information-processing efficiency in infancy (4 months), general mental development in toddlerhood (18 months), behavior difficulties in early childhood (36 months),…