Ninety-seven children aged 4-11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second…

This study explored developmental and individual differences in intellectual humility (IH) among 127 children ages 6-8. IH was operationalized as children's assessment of their knowledge and willingness to delegate scientific questions to experts. Children completed measures of IH, theory of mind, motivational framework, and intelligence, and…

The study examined the etiology of individual differences in early drawing and of its longitudinal association with school mathematics. Participants (N = 14,760), members of the Twins Early Development Study, were assessed on their ability to draw a human figure, including number of features, symmetry, and proportionality. Human figure drawing was…

Category-based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category-based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased…

Mothers' mental-state references predict individual differences in preschoolers' false-belief (FB) understanding; less is known about the origins of corresponding variation in school-age children. To address this gap, 105 children completed observations with their mothers at child ages 2 and 6, three FB tasks and a verbal comprehension…

The genetic effects on individual differences in reading development were examined using genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA) in a twin sample. In unrelated individuals (one twin per pair, n = 2,942), the GCTA-based heritability of reading fluency was ~20%-29% at ages 7 and 12. GCTA bivariate results showed that the phenotypic stability of…

Four- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 263) ability to inhibit privileged knowledge and simulate a naïve perspective were examined. Participants viewed pictures that were then occluded aside from a small ambiguous part. They offered suggestions for how a naïve person might interpret the hidden pictures, as well as rated the probability…

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 265) responded to eight scenarios presented on an eye tracker. Each trial involved a character who encounters a perpetrator who had previously enacted positive (P), negative (N), or both types of actions toward him or her in varying sequences (NN, PP, PN, and NP). Participants predicted the character's…

Different social experiences help children develop distinctions between domains of norms. This study investigated whether mothers respond differently to moral, prudential, and pragmatic norms during the 2nd year, a period that precedes the time when children are able to make explicit distinctions between these norms. Sixty mothers of infants…

In this study of two hundred and thirty 8- to 13-year-olds, a new "Silent Films" task is introduced, designed to address the dearth of research on theory of mind in older children by providing a film-based analogue of F. G. E. Happe's (1994) Strange Stories task. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that all items from both tasks loaded…

To better understand quantity and quality of divorced father contact, a weighted county sample of 230 divorced fathers with a child aged 4-11 years was employed to test whether fathers' antisocial personality (ASP) moderated effects of monthly contact with children in predicting children's observed noncompliance. Eighteen-month latent growth…

Processing the self-relevance of information facilitates recall. Similarly, processing close-other-related information facilitates recall to a lesser degree than processing self-relevant information. This memory advantage may be viewed as an index of the degree to which the representation of self is differentiated from representations of close…

Examines the relationship between young children's spatial exploration and their cognitive representations of environments. Children ages 20-28 months and 36-44 months explored a museum room; measures of the quantity and mode (active versus passive) of their exploration were recorded. Results indicate individual differences in the extent to which…

Delay/response inhibition in the presence of an attractive stimulus and compliance with maternal directives in a clean-up task were observed among subjects 18, 24, and 30 months of age. Results suggested (1) achievement of self-control is a major developmental accomplishment, and (2) individual differences in self-control emerge and are…

Factor scores from Bayley's Infant Behavior Record (obtained from 300 to 400 infants at six, 12, 18, and 24 months) were selected to represent three aspects of infant behavior: task orientation, test affect-extraversion, and activity. Findings indicate reordering of individual differences is age-related and that the reordering sequence is somewhat…