Defining developmental progressions can be an important step in identifying developmental precursors and mechanisms of change, within and across areas of reasoning. In one exploratory study, we examine whether the development of children's thinking about ownership follows a systematic progression wherein some components emerge reliably before…

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…

Knowing the temporal direction of causal relations is critical for producing desired outcomes and explaining events. Existing evidence suggests that children start to grasp that causes must precede their effects (the temporal priority principle) by age 3; however, whether younger children also understand this has, to our knowledge, not previously…

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…

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of eye-tracking methods to evaluate infant and toddler interpretation of visual stimuli. The application of these methods makes it increasingly important to understand the development of infant sensitivity to the perceptual properties implicated in such methods. In light of recent studies that…

Infants can help and share in the second year of life. However, there is limited knowledge as to variability in these behaviors as a function of target (e.g., caregiver vs. unfamiliar adult) and the influence of caregiver support on infant prosocial behavior. Infants (N = 268, 124 female) at 1-2 years of age (M = 1.47, SD = 0.27) and again at 2-3…

The present study examined what kind of parenting best supports toddlers' self-control in the context of poverty. Parents and toddlers (52% female; M[subscript age] = 2.60 years) in 117 families (35% White, 25% Black, 22% Latinx, 15% Multiracial, and 3% Asian; M family income = $1,845/month) engaged in structured interaction tasks, and toddlers…

This article investigates the early emergence of reason-giving. Toddlers are sensitive to disagreements, and they can track several kinds of informational access, such as visual perception. We investigated whether young children use these skills (a) when assessing whether providing reasons is needed and (b) when selecting appropriate behaviors to…

Real-time attention coordination in parent-toddler dyads is often studied in tightly controlled laboratory settings. These studies have demonstrated the importance of joint attention in scaffolding the development of attention and the types of dyadic behaviors that support early language learning. Little is known about how often these behaviors…

The present study examined individual differences in the development of sustained attention across toddlerhood, as well as how these individual differences related to the development of language and sleep. Toddlers (N = 314; 54% male) were assessed at 30, 36, and 42 months using multiple measures of attention, a standardized language assessment,…

Learning to descend stairs requires motor and cognitive capacities on the part of infants and opportunities for practice and assurance of safety offered by caregivers. The American Academy of Pediatrics prescribes the age strategy to teach toddlers to safely descend stairs but without much consideration for individual differences in infants'…

Toddlers' understanding of object rotation was investigated using a multimethod approach. Participants were 44 toddlers between 22 and 38 months of age. In an eye-tracking task, they observed a shape that rotated and disappeared briefly behind an occluder. In an object-fitting task, they rotated wooden blocks and fit them through apertures.…

Joint engagement--the sharing of events during social interactions--is an important context for early learning. To date, sharing topics that are only heard has not been systematically documented. To describe the development of auditory joint engagement, 48 child-parent dyads were observed 5 times from 12 to 30 months during seminaturalistic play.…

This study estimates the effect of physical punishment on the cognitive development of 1,167 low-income Colombian children (M[subscript age] = 17.8 months old) using 3 analytic strategies: lagged-dependent variables, a difference-in-differences-like approach (DD), and a novel strategy combining matching with a DD-like approach. Across approaches,…