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…

We used two simple unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify differential trajectories of change in children who undergo intensive working memory (WM) training. We used self-organizing maps (SOMs)--a type of simple artificial neural network--to represent multivariate cognitive training data, and then tested whether the way tasks are…

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and…

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the…

The ability to attend to one among multiple sources of information is central to everyday functioning. Just as central is the ability to switch attention among competing inputs as the task at hand changes. Such processes develop surprisingly slowly, such that even into adolescence, we remain slower and more error prone at switching among tasks…

Eye tracking was used to show that 18-month-old infants are sensitive to social context as a sign that others' actions are bound together as a collaborative sequence based on a joint goal. Infants observed five identical demonstrations in which Actor 1 moved a block to one location and Actor 2 moved the same block to a new location, creating…

Socioeconomic status is an important predictor of cognitive development and academic achievement. Late adolescence provides a unique opportunity to study how the attainment of socioeconomic status (in the form of years of education) relates to cognitive and neural development, during a time when age-related cognitive and neural development is…

Accumulating evidence suggests that North Americans tend to focus on central objects whereas East Asians tend to pay more attention to contextual information in a visual scene. Although it is generally believed that such culturally divergent attention tendencies develop through socialization, existing evidence largely depends on adult samples.…

Improvement in source memory performance throughout development is thought to be mediated by strategic processes that facilitate the retrieval of task-relevant information. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined developmental changes in these processes during adolescence. Adolescents (13-14 years) and adults (19-29 years) completed a…

Happe and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a "privileged domain" in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of…

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a specific deficit in visuo-spatial abilities. This finding, however, derives mainly from performance on small-scale laboratory-based tasks. This study investigated large-scale route learning in individuals with WS and two matched control groups (moderate learning difficulty group [MLD], typically…

To investigate the relation between cognitive and affective social understanding, Japanese 4- to 8-year-olds received tasks of first- and second-order false beliefs and prosocial and self-presentational display rules. From 6 to 8 years, children comprehended display rules, as well as second-order false belief, using social pressures justifications…

The current study evaluated the relative roles of conceptual knowledge and executive control on the development of "categorical flexibility," the ability to switch between simultaneously available but conflicting categorical representations of an object. Experiment 1 assessed conceptual knowledge and executive control together; Experiment 2…