Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have…

A problematic way to think about social categories is to essentialize them--to treat particular differences between people as marking fundamentally distinct social kinds. From where do these beliefs arise? Language that expresses generic claims about categories elicits some aspects of essentialism, but the scope of these effects remains unclear.…

According to Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934), the highest levels of abstract thinking and self-regulation in preschool development are established in "pretend play using object substitutions." An extensive research literature supports Vygotsky's empirical model of the internalization of self-guiding speech (social speech > private speech…

This paper explores the trend, between 1905 and the late 1920s in UK and US child psychology, of "discovering," labelling and calculating different "ages" in children. Those new "ages"--from mental to emotional, social, anatomical ages, and more--were understood as either replacing, or meaningfully related to,…

This study investigated cross-cultural variation in the development of executive functioning (EF) across the preschool period for United States and Chinese children from low and high socioeconomic families using a longitudinal design. Participants included 216 preschool children (n = 125 from the US; n = 91 from Shanghai and Jiangxi, China). On…

If school closures and social-distancing experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic impeded children's skill development, they may leave a lasting legacy in human capital. To understand the pandemic's effects on school children, this paper combines a review of the emerging international literature with new evidence from German longitudinal time-use…

The aim of the present work was to examine cultural differences in the development of speed of information processing. Four samples of US children ("N" = 509) and four samples of East Asian children ("N" = 661) completed psychometric measures of processing speed on two occasions. Analyses of the longitudinal data indicated…

Drawing on survey data from over 2000 parents, this paper explores the possibility of early-years swimming to add mathematical capital to young children. Using developmental milestones as the basis, it was found that parents reported significantly earlier achievement on many of these milestones. Such data suggest that the early years swim…

Racial disparities in child development in the United States are significant, with a particularly pronounced disadvantage among Black children. This report focuses on the development of children of Black immigrants, comparing against the outcomes for their peers in native-born and other immigrant families. The report also compares children in the…

It is widely acknowledged that, across the United Kingdom and the USA, childcare practitioners often struggle with cases of child neglect, because of the difficulties involved in attempting to define the problem at hand, and balancing these cases with others in the caseload that may appear more pressing, such as physical abuse. Consequently, in an…

The ability to transfer learning across contexts is an adaptive skill that develops rapidly during early childhood. Learning from television is a specific instance of transfer of learning between a two-dimensional (2D) representation and a three-dimensional (3D) object. Understanding the conditions under which young children might accomplish this…

The purpose of this research is to determine the effects of home-based programmes aimed specifically at improving developmental outcomes for preschool children from socially disadvantaged families. The authors searched the following databases between 7 October and 12 October 2010: Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (2010,…

There is an increasing support from international organizations and the research community for stepping beyond infant or child mortality as the most common child level social indicator and progressing towards an international measure of child development. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a teacher-completed measure of children's…

Theory of mind is claimed to develop universally among humans across cultures with vastly different folk psychologies. However, in the attempt to test and confirm a claim of universality, individual studies have been limited by small sample sizes, sample specificities, and an overwhelming focus on Anglo-European children. The current meta-analysis…