Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

Dimensional comparisons (i.e., comparing own performances across domains) may drive an increasing differentiation in students' math and verbal self-concepts over time, but little longitudinal research has directly tested this assumption. Using cross-sequential data spanning Grades 1-12 (N = 1069, ages 6-18, 92% White, 2% Black, 51% female,…

Although much is known about adults' ability to orient by means of cognitive maps (mental representations of the environment), it is less clear when this important ability emerges in development. In the present study, 97 seven- to 10-year-olds and 26 adults played a video game designed to investigate the ability to orient using cognitive maps. The…

It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters'…

Distractibility is the propensity to behaviorally react to irrelevant information. Although children are more distractible the younger they are, the precise contribution of attentional and motor components to distractibility and their developmental trajectories have not been characterized yet. We used a new behavioral paradigm to identify the…

Notwithstanding its well-established role on high-demanding spatial navigation tasks during adulthood, the effect of field dependence-independence during the acquisition of spatial navigation skills is almost unknown. This study assessed for the first time the effect of field dependence-independence on topographical learning (TL) across the life…

One of the core functions of explanation is to support prediction and generalization. However, some explanations license a broader range of predictions than others. For instance, an explanation about biology could be presented as applying to a specific case (e.g., "this bear") or more generally across "all animals." The current…

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual…

Character strengths are an integral component of positive youth development that can promote flourishing. Developmental principles posit constructs become increasingly complex with age, yet this process has not been examined with character. Using a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 2,467 youth ages 9-19, bifactor models were…

This research investigated whether episodic memory development can be explained by improvements in relational binding processes, involved in forming novel associations between events and the context in which they occurred. Memory for item-space, item-time, and item-item relations was assessed in an ethnically diverse sample of 151 children aged…

This study explored transactional associations among visuomotor integration, attention, fine motor coordination, and mathematics skills in a diverse sample of one hundred thirty-five 5-year-olds (kindergarteners) and one hundred nineteen 6-year-olds (first graders) in the United States who were followed over the course of 2 school years.…

Three studies explored the abilities of 205 children (5-11 years) and 74 adults (18-72 years) to distinguish directly versus indirectly acquired information in a scenario where an individual grew up in isolation from human culture. Directly acquired information is knowledge acquired through firsthand experience. Indirectly acquired information is…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

Age-related increases of speaking rate are not fully understood, but have been attributed to gains in biologic factors and learned skills that support speech production. This study investigated developmental changes in speaking rate and articulatory kinematics of participants aged 4 ("N" = 7), 7 ("N" = 10), 10…