The ability to use knowledge to guide the completion of goals is a critical cognitive skill, but 3-year-olds struggle to complete goals that require multiple steps. This study asked whether 3-year-olds could benefit from "plan chunking" to complete multistep goals. Thirty-two U.S. children (range = 35.75-46.59 months; 18 girls; 9 white,…

Memory decision-making in 26- to 32-month-olds was investigated using visual-paired comparison paradigms, requiring toddlers to select familiar stimuli (Active condition) or view familiar and novel stimuli (Passive condition). In Experiment 1 (N = 108, 54.6% female, 62% White; replication N = 98), toddlers with higher accuracy in the Active…

The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6-7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these…

Working memory training improves children's cognitive performance on untrained tasks; however, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. This was investigated in 32 typically developing children aged 10-14 years (19 girls and 13 boys) using a randomized controlled design and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (Devon, UK;…

This study investigated the effects of bilingualism on set-shifting and working memory in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Bilinguals with ASD were predicted to display a specific bilingual advantage in set-shifting, but not working memory, relative to monolinguals with ASD. Forty 6- to 9-year-old children participated (20 ASD, 20…

Improvements in cognitive flexibility during the preschool years have been linked to developments in both working memory and inhibitory control, though the precise contribution of each remains unclear. In the current study, one hundred and twenty 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds completed two rule-switching tasks. In one version, children switched rules in…

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…

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study,…

This study investigated the relation between theory of mind (ToM) and metamemory knowledge using a training methodology. Sixty-two 4- to 5-year-old children were recruited and randomly assigned to one of two training conditions: A first-order false belief (ToM) and a control condition. Intervention and control groups were equivalent at pretest for…

Building on longitudinal findings of linkages between aspects of teachers' language during instruction and children's use of mnemonic strategies, this investigation was designed to examine experimentally the impact of instruction on memory development. First and second graders ("N" = 54, "M"[subscript age] = 7 years)…

Fifty 8-month-old infants participated in a study of the interrelations among cognition, temperament, and electrophysiology. Better performance on a working memory task (assessed using a looking version of the A-not-B task) was associated with increases in frontal-parietal EEG coherence from baseline to task, as well as elevated levels of…

Previous research has suggested that performance for items requiring memory-binding processes improves between ages 4 and 6 (J. Sluzenski, N. Newcombe, & S. L. Kovacs, 2006). The present study suggests that much of this improvement is due to retrieval, as opposed to encoding, deficits for 4-year-olds. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 48 per age)…

Goal neglect is the phenomenon of failing to execute the momentary demands of a task despite understanding and being able to recall the task instructions. Successful goal maintenance is more likely to occur in adults with high working memory capacity (WMC) who can keep rules mentally accessible while performing the task. The current study…

This study examined developmental trends in object and spatial working memory (WM) using heart rate (HR) to provide an index of covert cognitive processes. Participants in 4 age groups (6-7, 9-10, 11-12, 18-26, n=20 each) performed object and spatial WM tasks, in which each trial was followed by feedback. Spatial WM task performance reached adult…

The role of categorical versus associative relations in 5-, 7-, and 11-year-old children's true and false memories was examined using the Deese--Roediger--McDermott (DRM) paradigm and categorized lists of pictures or words with or without category labels as primes. For true items, recall increased with age and categorized lists were better…