Background: Parenting strategies such as communicating clear expectations, providing calm directions, and teaching specific skills can strengthen young children's social-emotional development. Parenting programs for children with disruptive behavior often emphasize gaining compliance via effective directives, and less on how to facilitate child…

Research Findings: The present study examined (a) whether children's negative emotionality traits (anger proneness and unsoothability) interactively predict mothers' authoritarian parenting (AP) and (b) whether children's negative emotionality moderates the associations between AP and children's performance on a spatial cognitive task. Eighty…

The current research compared the ability of adults and children to determine where another person is looking in shared visual space (triadic gaze). In Experiment 1, children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults viewed photographs of a model fixating a series of positions separated by 1.6 degrees along the horizontal plane. The task was to…

de Hevia and Spelke (de Hevia and Spelke (2009). Spontaneous mapping of number and space in adults and young children, "Cognition, 110", 198-207) investigated the mapping of number onto space. To this end, they introduced a non-symbolic flanker task. Here subjects have to bisect a line that is flanked by a 2-dot and a 9-dot array. Similar to the…

The change detection task has been used in dozens of studies with adults to measure visual working memory capacity. Two studies have recently tested children in this task, suggesting a gradual increase in capacity from 5 years to adulthood. These results contrast with findings from an infant looking paradigm suggesting that capacity reaches…