Creative thinking is critical to overcome many daily life situations. As such, there has been a growing interest on how creative thinking develops during childhood. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms driving its development. Indeed, almost all research has focused on divergent thinking, leaving aside convergent thinking, and…

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challenging to evaluate replications of experimental effects and to relate performance in cognitive tasks to other constructs of interest. In developmental…

The ability to prioritize remembering explicitly valuable information is termed value-based remembering. Critically, the processes and contexts that support the development of value-based remembering are largely unknown. The present study examined the effects of feedback and metacognitive differences on value-based remembering in predominantly…

On a daily basis, children make decisions about how to negotiate their physical environment. Sometimes they engage in physical tasks that involve risk, requiring them to judge the safety of how to negotiate the environment safely. Individual differences in children's age, sex, physical size, and personality may impact those decisions. We used…

Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatial representations to think about this abstract concept. Spatial representations of time are thought to support temporal concepts that might otherwise be difficult to represent and reason about, such as the temporal component of episodic memory. One common form of spatially…

This empirical tracking case study explores the content and quality of an infant's home musical environment and family member-infant musical interactions. To this end, this study tracked and analyzed audio recordings of an infant girl's family life between the ages of seven and thirteen months and follow-up interviews with her parents. The…

Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

In this report, we perform a descriptive analysis of kindergarten readiness in Illinois. We use data on the population of Illinois kindergarteners between the 2017-18 and 2021-22 school years provided by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). In our analysis, we build on the existing literature and examine readiness over time, by domain,…

The choice of cortisol sampling times in early childhood studies varies widely. Given that recommendations on sampling protocols are largely based on adults, the present study aimed to broaden current knowledge by examining how reliably cortisol measures obtained at different daytimes would reveal between-individual differences in toddlers'…

The present study used a novel, well-controlled paradigm to investigate the development of cool, hot-positive, and hot-negative inhibitory control in a sample of children (6- to 11-year-old; N = 38, 21 females), adolescents (12- to 18-year-old; N = 38, 24 females), and adults (19- to 38-year-old; N = 38, 28 females; sample location: United…

The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6-7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these…

This study aims to understand individual differences between children in metacognitive monitoring and control processes and the developmental trajectories of metacognition over one year. Three indicators of procedural metacognition were used: monitoring accuracy (discrimination of confidence judgments between correct and incorrect test responses),…

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal…

Children with special educational needs (CSEN) in the early years have been identified as vulnerable to the pandemic restrictions. This study explored the lived experiences of educators teaching CSEN online in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 school closures. Semi-structured interviews with 21 educators revealed that educators perceived the prolonged…

Background: Although research clearly demonstrates the importance of motivation in mathematics learning, relatively little is known about the developmental dynamics between different facets of mathematics motivation and performance, especially in the early years of schooling. Aims: In a longitudinal setting, we examined (1) how children's ability…