Concurrent learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies has been shown in adults only. This study extended this line of research by examining dependency-specific learning for both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies concurrently in both adults and children. Seventy adults aged 18 to 64 (40 women, 30 men; Experiment 1) and 64 children aged…

Children's development and education take place in educational buildings with highly complex acoustic scenes, including spatially distributed target speakers, many surrounding distracting sounds, and general background noises. Auditory selective attention, therefore, is a valuable tool to orient oneself, to focus on specific sound sources, and to…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African…

Understanding gender differences in human cognitive development may contribute to understanding the gender differences in outcomes in cognitive ageing. However, evaluation of this topic has been hindered by a lack of representative, longitudinal data from different aged cohorts measured on the same cognitive tests. Gender differences in cognitive…

Interference control is central to cognitive control and, more generally, to many aspects of development. Despite its importance, the understanding of the processes underlying mean interference effects across development is still limited. When measured through conflict tasks, mean interference effects reflect both the strength of the initial…

Inhibitory control has been widely studied in association with social and academic adjustment. However, prior studies have generally overlooked the potential heterotypic continuity of inhibitory control and how this could affect assessment and understanding of its development. In the present study, we systematically considered heterotypic…

Handled artifacts are ubiquitous in human technology, but how young children engage in spatially coordinated behaviors with these artifacts is not well understood. To address this issue, children (N = 30) from 17-36 months were studied with motion tracking technology as they fit the distal segment of a handled artifact into a slot. The handle was…

The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

Interference control, the ability to overcome distraction from irrelevant information, undergoes considerable improvement during childhood, yet the mechanisms driving these changes remain unclear. The present study investigated the relative influence of interference at the level of the stimulus or the response. Seven-, 10-, and 20-year-olds…

This study aimed at investigating the ability to learn regularities across the life span and examine whether this learning process can be supported or hampered by verbalizations. For this purpose, children (aged 8-10 years) and younger (aged 19-30 years) and older (aged 70-80 years) adults took part in a sequence learning experiment. We found that…

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and…

We investigated the effects of age on proactive and reactive cognitive control in a large population sample of 809 individuals, ranging in age between 5 and 97 years. For that purpose, we used an anticue paradigm, which required a consistent remapping of cue location and response hand: Left-sided cues required right-hand responses and vice versa.…

Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated or structured sequence capture attention and affect performance in an ongoing visual task negatively, testament to the balance between selective attention and change detection. Although deviance distraction has been the object of much research, its modulation across the life span has been more scarcely…

Saccade latency is widely used across infant psychology to investigate infants' understanding of events. Interpreting particular latency values requires knowledge of standard saccadic RTs, but there is no consensus as to typical values. This study provides standard estimates of infants' (n = 194, ages 9 to 15 months) saccadic RTs under a range of…