Although exploratory play is considered a hallmark of cognitive development and learning, relatively few studies have been able to quantitatively characterize the shifts that may occur in children's approach to exploration. One reason for this gap is due to challenges coding and analyzing children's exploratory play behavior. In our paper, we…

During human childhood, brain development and body growth compete for limited metabolic resources, resulting in a trade-off where energy allocated to brain development can decrease as body growth accelerates. This preregistered study explores the relationship between language skills, serving as a proxy for brain development, and body mass index at…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with adults provide evidence that functional brain networks, including the default mode network and frontoparietal network, underlie executive functioning (EF). However, given the challenges of using fMRI with infants and young children, little work has assessed the developmental trajectories of…

Developmental psychology focuses on how psychological constructs change with age. In cognitive development research, however, the specifics of this emergence is often underspecified. Researchers often provisionally assume linear growth by including chronological age as a predictor in regression models. In this work, we aim to evaluate this…

Disparities in socioeconomic status (SES) may affect individuals' risk preferences, which have important developmental consequences across the lifespan. Yet, previous research has shown inconsistent associations between SES and risky decision-making, and little is known about how this link develops from a young age. The current research is among…

Executive functions (EF) are key predictors of long-term success that develop rapidly in early childhood. However, EF's developmental trajectory from preschool to kindergarten is not fully understood due to conceptual ambiguity (e.g., whether it is a single construct or multiple related constructs) and methodological limitations (e.g., previous…

Interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are fundamental to human emotion. Despite the central role of frontoamygdala communication in adult emotional learning and regulation, little is known about how top-down control emerges during human development. In the present cross-sectional pilot study, we experimentally manipulated…

A basic question about bilingual development is how the acquisition of one language affects the acquisition of the other. Previous findings are few and mixed. The present study addressed this question with longitudinal data on the dual-language vocabulary growth of 149 US-born children from Spanish-speaking immigrant families, who were followed…

We examined the developmental differences in motor control and learning of a two-segment movement. One hundred and five participants (53 female) were divided into three age groups (7-8 years, 9-10 years and 19-27 years). They performed a two-segment movement task in four conditions (full vision, fully disturbed vision, disturbed vision in the…

Sleep spindles are related to sleep-dependent memory consolidation and general cognitive abilities. However, they undergo drastic maturational changes during adolescence. Here we used a longitudinal approach (across 7 years) to explore whether developmental changes in sleep spindle density can explain individual differences in sleep-dependent…

This research investigates the effect of production on 4.5- to 6-year-old children's recognition of newly learned words. In Experiment 1, children were taught four novel words in a produced or heard training condition during a brief training phase. In Experiment 2, children were taught eight novel words, and this time training condition was in a…

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…

Spatial thinking is an important predictor of mathematics. However, existing data do not determine whether all spatial sub-domains are equally important for mathematics outcomes nor whether mathematics-spatial associations vary through development. This study addresses these questions by exploring the developmental relations between mathematics…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

There is general agreement that humans represent numerical, spatial, and temporal magnitudes from early in development. However, there is disagreement about whether different magnitudes converge within a general magnitude system and whether this system supports behavioral demonstrations of cross-magnitude interactions at different developmental…