Preterm birth poses a major public health challenge, with significant and heterogeneous developmental impacts. Latent profile analysis was applied to the National Institutes of Health Toolbox performance of 1891 healthy prematurely born children from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study (970 boys, 921 girls; 10.00 ± 0.61 years;…

Individuals track probabilities, such as associations between events in their environments, but less is known about the degree to which experience--within a learning session and over development--influences people's use of incoming probabilistic information to guide behavior in real time. In two experiments, children (4-11 years) and adults…

Cognitive effort is costly and this cost likely influences the activities in which children engage. Yet, little is known about how school-age children perceive cognitive effort. The subjective value of cognitive effort, that is, how valuable or costly effort is perceived, was investigated in seventy-three 7- to 12-year-olds using an effort…

Epigenetics provides the opportunity to revolutionize our understanding of the role of genetics and the environment in explaining human behavior, although the use of epigenetics to study human behavior is just beginning. In this introduction, the authors present the basics of epigenetics in a way that is designed to make this exciting field…

This study examined future-oriented behavior in children (3-6 years; N = 193) from three diverse societies--one industrialized Western city and two small, geographically isolated communities. Children had the opportunity to prepare for two alternative versions of an immediate future event over six trials. Some 3-year-olds from all cultures…

Four tasks (N = 191, 3- to 6-year-olds) examined the effect of instrumental versus conventional language cues on children's imitative fidelity of a necklace-making activity, their memory and transmission of the activity, and their perceptions of functional fixedness. Children in the conventional condition imitated with higher fidelity, transmitted…

Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological model proposes that events in higher order social ecosystems should influence human development through their impact on events in lower order social ecosystems. This proposition was tested with respect to ecological violence and the development of children's aggression via analyses of 3 waves of data (1 wave…

The stability of sex-typed behavior from the preschool to the middle school years was examined. The Preschool Activities Inventory, a measure of within-sex variation in sex-typed behavior, was completed by the primary caregiver when the child was 2.5, 3.5, and 5 years, and a modified version, the Child Activities Inventory, was completed by the…

Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the…

Do children have coexisting but contradictory beliefs about things like magic? Some patterns of behavior that seem to reflect contradictory beliefs may stem from children's recognition that their knowledge about events is incomplete and therefore things may occur without them understanding how. In addition, children may hold certain beliefs that…

Investigates the representative frequencies of aggression of 43 children at the ages of 2 and 5 years. Dimensions of physical aggression at age 2 predicted dimensions of physical aggression at age 5. Frequency, initiations, and average length of aggression decreased between 2 and 5 years of age. (RJC)

Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue) considered many important conceptual and methodological issues in their discussion of emotion regulation. Although it may be necessary to develop an integrated definition of the construct of emotion regulation, the definition provided in the Cole et al. article is too encompassing. It is important to…

Examined whether young children can identify breaches of a permission rule and their sensitivity to the implications of such rules. Found that preschool children show considerable facility in reasoning about permission rules and can justify their choices. Results suggest that, when children violate a permission rule, they do so knowingly. (MOK)

In this sample of 66 dual-earner mothers and fathers and their 1-year-old infants, associations among parental ratings of infant difficulty, parental perceived control over caregiving outcomes, and parental sensitive and directive behavior were examined during a triadic free-play session in the home. Perceived infant difficulty was related to…

This article describes the average and group-based developmental trajectories of aggression, opposition, property violations, and status violations using parent reports of externalizing behaviors on a longitudinal multiple birth cohort study of 2,076 children aged 4 to 18 years. Trajectories were estimated from multilevel growth curve analyses and…