Joint attention (JA) has been found to correlate with many developmental outcomes. However, little is known about how naturalistic JA is established and develops during early infancy. In this study, free-flowing tabletop toy play between infants at 5 and 15 months and their mothers (N = 48 dyads; 65% white) was observed to (1) examine changes in…

Moving is common during middle childhood, but links between move type and children's development are less well understood. Using nationally-representative, longitudinal data (2010-2016) of [approximately]9900 U.S. kindergarteners (52% boys, 51.48% White, 26.11% Hispanic/Latino, 10.63% Black, 11.78% Asian/Pacific Islander), we conducted…

This study examined gender differences in reading behavior of 2652 Danish 5th-grade students (age 10-12 years, girls 51%, 14% immigrant background) observed for 218 days in 2019/2020, using data from a popular reading app. Reading behavior was operationalized as time spent reading. Analyses of timing of reading behavior and models of day-to-day…

Children's ability to benefit from spatiotemporal regularities to detect goal-relevant targets was tested in a dynamic, extended context. Young adults and children (from a low-deprivation area school in the United Kingdom; N = 80; 5-6 years; 39 female; ethics approval did not permit individual-level race/ethnicity surveying) completed a dynamic…

English-speaking adults often recruit a "mental timeline" to represent events from left-to-right (LR), but its developmental origins are debated. Here, we test whether preschoolers prefer ordered linear representations of events and whether they prefer culturally conventional directions. English-speaking adults (n = 85) and 3- to…

How does one assess developmental change when the measures themselves change with development? Most developmental studies of word learning use either looking (infants) or pointing (preschoolers and older). With little empirical evidence of the relationship between the two measures, developmental change is difficult to assess. This paper analyzes…

This study explored children's causal reasoning about the past and future. U.S. adults (n = 60) and 3-to-6-year-olds (n = 228) from an urban, middle-class population (49% female; [approximately] 45% white) participated between 2017 and 2019. Participants were told three-step causal stories and asked about the effects of a change to the second…

Whether high quantities of center-based care cause behavior problems is a controversial question. Studies using covariate adjustment for selection factors have detected relations between center care and behavior problems, but studies with stronger internal validity less often find such evidence. We examined whether within-child changes in hours in…

We investigated the role of children's conflict monitoring skills in revising an intuitive scientific theory. Children aged 5 to 9 (N = 177; 53% girls, data collected in Germany from 2019-2023) completed computer-based tasks on water displacement, a concept prone to misconceptions. Children predicted which of two objects would displace more water…

Studying within-person variability in children's behavior is frequently hindered by challenges collecting repeated observations. This study used wearable accelerometers to collect an intensive time series (2.7 million observations) of young children's movement at school (N = 62, M[subscript age] = 4.5 years, 54% male, 74% Non-Hispanic White) in…

The effects of rewards on executive function (EF) reflect bidirectional interactions among motivational and executive systems that vary with age and temperament. However, methodological limitations hinder understanding of the precise influences of incentives on early EF, including the role of reward sensitivity. In this within-subjects study,…

This study investigated associations between kindergarten teachers' (N = 208) depressive symptoms and students' (Ghanaian nationals, N = 1490, M[subscript age] = 5.8) school-readiness skills (early literacy, early numeracy, social-emotional skills, and executive function) across 208 schools in Ghana over one school year. Teachers' depressive…

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were…

Fluent conversation requires temporal organization between conversational exchanges. By performing a systematic review and Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis, we map the trajectory of infants' turn-taking abilities over the course of early development (0 to 70 months). We synthesize the evidence from 26 studies (78 estimates from 429 unique…

Using psychological network analysis, this study explored the heterogeneity of the network structure between extracurricular time-use and delinquency using a nationally representative longitudinal survey of at-school students in China (N = 10,279, 47.3% female, average age 13.6, 91.2% Han ethnicity). The results are threefold: First, time…