Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

Symbolic numeracy first emerges as children learn the meanings of number words and how to use them to precisely count sets of objects. This development starts before children enter school and forms a foundation for lifelong mathematics achievement. Despite its importance, exactly how children acquire this basic knowledge is unclear. Here we test…

Habituation and dishabituation are the most prevalent measures of infant cognitive functioning, and they have reliably been shown to predict later cognitive outcomes. Yet, the exact mechanisms underlying infant habituation and dishabituation are still unclear. To investigate them, we tested 106 8-month-old infants on a classic habituation task and…

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual…

Functional connectivity within and between Intrinsic Connectivity Networks (ICNs) transforms over development and is thought to support high order cognitive functions. But how variable is this process, and does it diverge with altered cognitive development? We investigated age-related changes in integration and segregation within and between ICNs…

A long-standing debate in the field of numerical cognition concerns the degree to which symbolic and non-symbolic processing are related over the course of development. Of particular interest is the possibility that this link depends on the range of quantities in question. Behavioral and neuroimaging research with adults suggests that symbolic and…

Exposure to childhood adversity has been consistently associated with poor developmental outcomes, but it is unclear whether these associations vary across different forms of adversity. We examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between threat and deprivation with cognition, emotional processing, and psychopathology in a…

Family socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly associated with children's cognitive development, and past studies have reported socioeconomic disparities in both neurocognitive skills and brain structure across childhood. In other studies, bilingualism has been associated with cognitive advantages and differences in brain structure across the…

Low executive function (EF) during early childhood is a major risk factor for developmental delay, academic failure, and social withdrawal. Susceptible genes may affect the molecular and biological mechanisms underpinning EF. More specifically, genes associated with the regulation of prefrontal dopamine may modulate the response of prefrontal…

Adult neuroimaging studies have demonstrated dissociable neural activation patterns in the visual cortex in response to letters (Latin alphabet) and numbers (Arabic numerals), which suggest a strong experiential influence of reading and mathematics on the human visual system. Here, developmental trajectories in the event-related potential (ERP)…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…

In early childhood, humans learn culturally specific symbols for number that allow them entry into the world of complex numerical thinking. Yet little is known about how the brain supports the development of the uniquely human symbolic number system. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging along with an effective connectivity analysis…

The integrated theory of numerical development posits that a central theme of numerical development from infancy to adulthood is progressive broadening of the types and ranges of numbers whose magnitudes are accurately represented. The process includes four overlapping trends: (1) representing increasingly precisely the magnitudes of non-symbolic…