Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

Children perform worse than adults on tests of cognitive flexibility, which is a component of executive function. To assess what aspects of a cognitive flexibility task (cued switching) children have difficulty with, investigators tested where eye gaze diverged over age. Eye-tracking was used as a proxy for attention during the preparatory period…

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…

This research examined the ability of young (N = 96) children to learn about a change in the location of a hidden object, either via an adult's verbal testimony or from direct observation. Thirty-month-olds searched with equal accuracy whether they were told about the change or directly observed it. By contrast, when 23-month-olds were told about…

The study explored how the meaning of prosocial behavior changes over toddlerhood. Sixty-five 18- and 30-month-olds could help an adult in 3 contexts: instrumental (action based), empathic (emotion based), and altruistic (costly). Children at both ages helped readily in instrumental tasks. For 18-month-olds, empathic helping was significantly more…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Young children show significant changes in their mental-state understanding as marked by their performance on false-belief tasks. This study provides evidence for activity in the prefrontal cortex associated with the development of this ability. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as adults (N = 24) and 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old…

Classic theories of self-development suggest people define themselves in part through internalized perceptions of other people's beliefs about them, known as reflected self-appraisals. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the neural correlates of direct and reflected self-appraisals in adolescence (N = 12, ages 11-14…

This study tests the firm distinction children are said to make between living and nonliving kinds. Three, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults reasoned about whether items that varied on 3 dimensions (alive, face, behavior) had a range of properties (biological, psychological, perceptual, artifact, novel, proper names). Findings demonstrate…

In 2 experiments a total of 28 6-and 8-year olds and 9 adults were tested on a task that required making left-right directional judgments from various rotated orientations. The results supported the hypothesis that respondents who answered correctly performed imaginary rotations to correctly align themselves with the object. (MDM)

This research explored the development of one insight about the mind, namely, the belief that people's trains of thought differ even when they see the same stimulus. In Study 1, 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults heard stories about characters who saw the same object. Although the older groups predicted the object would trigger different trains…

The study was to determine when the patterns of causal evidence proposed by Orvis, Cunningham and Kelly (1975) begin to function as schemata in the attributional process. One hundred forty-four subjects took part in the study. (RH)

The locative categories--"in,""above,""below," and "beside"--were investigated to determine whether their exemplars were organized according to the prototype distinction. (RH)

Reports two experiments conducted in an attempt to extend findings by Ellis which suggest a rehearsal deficit in mentally retarded adults. (Author/SDH)

Challenges the notion that long-term memory retrieval efficiency is a potential source of individual and developmental differences in cognitive functioning. Fourth-grade, eighth-grade, and college-aged subjects participated in a task using the Posner letter matching paradigm and were assessed with tests of verbal and spatial ability. (Author/CB)