Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) refers to the process through which individuals learn and apply social, emotional, behavioral, and character skills required to succeed in schooling, the workplace, relationships, and citizenship. In public discussion of SEL, not everyone can quite agree on what it is. To some, it involves a set of tools for…

Developmental theory has long emphasized the importance of linking perception, cognition, and action. Techniques designed to record the spatial and temporal characteristics of hand movements (i.e., "manual dynamics") present new opportunities to study the nature of these links across development by providing a window into how perceptual,…

Mind in the Making and Vroom are partner initiatives that exemplify a unique "civic science" approach to "bringing developmental science into the world." Mind in the Making offers families and professionals working with children 0-8 access to developmental research, by engaging them in an active process of professional…

What do we know about immersive media--virtual, augmented, mixed, and cross realities (VR, AR, MR, and XR)--and young children? So far, designers, developers, and media producers have been focusing on creating hardware, software, and content for and conducting studies with adolescents and adults--but children find these technologies incredibly…

Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field. The "2020 Summary of Advances in Autism Research" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles…

Dual-process theories have gained increasing importance in psychology. The contrast that they describe between an old intuitive and a new deliberative mind seems to make these theories especially suited to account for development. Accordingly, this special issue aims at presenting the latest applications of dual-process theories to cognitive…

Most research on children's conception of death has probed their understanding of its biological aspects: its inevitability, irreversibility and terminal impact. Yet many adults subscribe to a religious conception implying that death marks the beginning of a new life. Two recent empirical studies confirm that in the course of development, children…

We argue that infant meaning-making processes are a central mechanism governing both typical and pathological outcomes. Infants, as open dynamic systems, must constantly garner information to increase their complexity and coherence. They fulfill this demand by making nonverbal "meaning"--affects, movements, representations--about themselves in…

Does plasticity contribute to adult cognitive development, and if so, in what ways? The vague and overused concept of plasticity makes these controversial questions difficult to answer. In this article, we refine the notion of adult cognitive plasticity and sharpen its conceptual distinctiveness. According to our framework, adult cognitive…

This article explores the unique and personal experience of learning within a broader framework of development called skill theory. The framework offers a perspective for recognizing within a diversity of experiences a stable order of increasing complexity in skills that individuals display as they execute or demonstrate changes in their…

In recent years, playful methods of learning have almost disappeared from school classrooms, and active, creative, extended playtimes during recess, at home, and in neighborhoods have also greatly diminished. This disappearance of play is especially unfortunate because it is happening at the very time that professionals in many scientific,…

The cognitive control of behavior is critical for success in school. The emergence of self-control in development has been linked to the ability to represent one's own and others' mental states (theory of mind and metacognition). Despite rapid progress in exploring the neural correlates of both mind reading and executive function in recent years,…

Relational thinking plays a central role in human cognition. However, it is not known how children and adults acquire relational concepts and come to represent them in a form that is useful for the purposes of relational thinking (i.e., as structures that can be dynamically bound to arguments). The authors present a theory of how a psychologically…

Children around the world are affected by discrimination and social exclusion due to their age, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, indigenous background, or other statuses. When considering the negative consequences of discrimination and social exclusion on children's development and well-being, it is of paramount importance to examine the…

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting…