Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to…

We investigated mental rotation in children by systematically varying the adult cube aggregate's set size, rotation angle, and picture/depth plane rotations in a new test. Eighty 4- to 11-year-old mainly middle-class children (British Indian and British African majority and white minority; 40 girls and 40 boys) were assessed using the new…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

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…

Childhood is a period when memory consolidation and knowledge base undergo rapid changes. The present study examined short-delay (overnight) and long-delay (after a 2-week period) consolidation of new information either congruent or incongruent with prior knowledge in typically developing 6- to 8-year-old children (n = 32), 9- to 11-year-old…

A cardinal feature of adult cognition is the awareness of our own cognitive struggles and the capacity to draw upon this awareness to offload internal demand into the environment. In this preregistered study conducted in Australia, we investigated whether 3-8-year-olds (N = 72, 36 male, 36 female, mostly White) could self-initiate such an external…

Most infants exhibit an attentional bias for faces and fearful facial expressions. These biases reduce toward the third year of life, but little is known about the development of the biases beyond early childhood. We used the same methodology longitudinally to assess attention disengagement patterns from nonface control pictures and faces…

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…

Kim and Opfer (2017) found that number-line estimates increased approximately logarithmically with number when an upper bound (e.g., 100 or 1000) was explicitly marked (bounded condition) and when no upper bound was marked (unbounded condition). Using procedural suggestions from Cohen and Ray (2020), we examined whether this logarithmicity might…

Future-oriented thought is ubiquitous in humans but challenging to study in children. Adults not only think about the future but can also represent a future state of the world that differs from the present. However, behavioral tasks to assess the development of future thought have not traditionally required children to do so as most can be solved…

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent--"truthiness." This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a…

Debates about lowering the voting age often center on whether 16- and 17-year-old adolescents possess sufficient cognitive capacity and political knowledge to participate in politics. Little empirical research has examined age differences in adolescents' and adults' complexity of reasoning about political issues. We surveyed adults (n = 778;…

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…

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli--for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during…

Previous research has shown that when learning categories, adults and young children allocate attention differently. Adults tend to attend selectively, focusing primarily on the most relevant information, whereas young children tend to distribute their attention broadly. Although selective attention is useful in many situations, it also has costs.…