Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even "enhanced," social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high-adversity contexts (i.e. 'hidden talents'). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory…

Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other's rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal…

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…

Age-related change in processing speed has been linked directly to increases in reasoning as well as indirectly via increases in the capacity of working memory (WM). Most of the evidence linking change in speed to reasoning has come from cross-sectional research; in this article we present the findings from a 2½-year longitudinal study of 277 6-…

Learning of the mathematical number line has been hypothesized to be dependent on an inherent sense of approximate quantity. Children's number line placements are predicted to conform to the underlying properties of this system; specifically, placements are exaggerated for small numerals and compressed for larger ones. Alternative hypotheses…

In their first years, children's understanding of mental states seems to improve dramatically, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are still unclear. Such "theory of mind" (ToM) abilities may arise during development, or have an innate basis, developmental changes reflecting limitations of other abilities involved in ToM tasks (e.g.…

Relational reasoning is an essential component of fluid intelligence, and is known to have a protracted developmental trajectory. To date, little is known about the neural changes that underlie improvements in reasoning ability over development. In this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, children aged 8-12 and adults…

False recognition in children aged 5, 8, and 11 years was investigated using the standard version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure and an alternative version in which the DRM stimuli were embedded in stories designed to emphasize their overall theme. Relative to the 8- and 11-year-olds, the 5-year-olds falsely recognized fewer…

That competences may emerge given appropriate environmental and behavioral context is a long-standing theme in developmental research. Work in the motor domain, but also in cognitive development, has made it possible to transform this idea into a mechanistic account closely linked to empirical evidence. In dynamic systems thinking, such capacities…

Children's thinking is highly variable at every level of analysis, from neural and associative levels to the level of strategies, theories, and other aspects of high-level cognition. This variability exists within people as well as between them; individual children often rely on different strategies or representations on closely related problems…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to…