Recently, several studies have suggested that metacognition emerges early in infancy and toddlerhood. However, to date, the developmental trajectory of these early metacognitive monitoring and control processes and their influence on children's later memory functioning remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to longitudinally document…

Children with a history of behaviorally inhibited (BI) temperament face a heightened risk for anxiety disorders and often use control strategies that are less planful. Although these relations have been observed concurrently in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence, few studies leverage longitudinal data to examine long-term…

Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the development of this organization during infancy. Middle-high socioeconomic status Mexican toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a…

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have…

The architecture of sleep undergoes distinct changes during childhood and early adolescence. Slow wave sleep is involved in memory processing and may support active consolidation of newly encoded representations to support the formation of abstracted "gist" memories. Here, we examined sleep and overnight memory formation in German school…

Developmental delays in cognitive flexibility early in elementary school can potentially increase vulnerability for subsequent externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. The first goal of the current study was to identify latent subgroups of children characterized by different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility throughout…

The ability to bind, or link, different aspects of an experience in memory undergoes protracted development across childhood. Most studies of memory binding development have assessed extraobject binding between an object and some external element such as another object, whereas little work has examined the development of intraobject binding, such…

Little is known about how children generate options for taking action in familiar situations or how they select which action option to actually perform. In this article, we explore the interplay between option generation and selection from a developmental perspective using sports as a testbed. In a longitudinal design with four measurement waves,…

This study examines the extent to which iron deficiency in infancy contributes to adverse neurocognitive and educational outcomes in young adulthood directly and indirectly, through its influence on verbal cognition and attention problems in childhood. Young adults (N = 1,000, M age = 21.3 years, 52% female; of Spanish or indigenous descent) from…

Music cognition is typically studied with instrumental stimuli. Adults remember melodies better, however, when they are presented in a biologically significant timbre (i.e., the human voice) than in various instrumental timbres (Weiss, Trehub, & Schellenberg, 2012). We examined the impact of vocal timbre on children's processing of melodies.…

Although most of the faces we encounter daily are moving ones, much of what we know about face processing and its development is based on studies using static faces that emphasize holistic processing as the hallmark of mature face processing. Here the authors examined the effects of facial movements on face processing developmentally in children…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

This study examined children's attention biases to negative emotional stimuli as mediators of associations between interparental hostility and children's externalizing symptoms. Participants included 243 children (M[subscript age] = 4.60 years) and their parents and teachers across three annual measurement occasions. Cross-lagged latent change…

In the number-to-position task, with increasing age and numerical expertise, children's pattern of estimates shifts from a biased (nonlinear) to a formal (linear) mapping. This widely replicated finding concerns symbolic numbers, whereas less is known about other types of quantity estimation. In Experiment 1, Preschool, Grade 1, and Grade 3…

Three-year-old children saw an adult displaying the exact same distress in 3 different conditions: (a) the adult's distress was appropriate to a genuine harm, (b) the adult's distress was an overreaction to a minor inconvenience, and (c) there was no apparent cause for the adult's distress. Children who witnessed the adult being appropriately…