Inhibitory control (IC) emerges in infancy, continues to develop throughout childhood and is linked to later life outcomes such as school achievement, prosocial behavior, and psychopathology. Little, however, is known about the neural processes underpinning IC, especially in 2-year-olds. In this study, we examine functional connectivity (FC) in…

A growing body of work suggests that speaker-race influences how infants and toddlers interpret the meanings of words. In two experiments, we explored the role of speaker-race on whether newly learned word-object pairs are generalized to new speakers. Seventy-two 20-month-olds were taught two word-object pairs from a familiar race speaker, and two…

Reading disorders are common in children and can impact academic success, mental health, and career prospects. Reading is supported by network of interconnected left hemisphere brain regions, including temporo-parietal, occipito-temporal, and inferior-frontal circuits. Poor readers often show hypoactivation and reduced gray matter volumes in this…

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…

This paper used a nationally representative sample of children from the United States to examine the extent to which physical activity and sports participation may promote growth in children's executive functions (EFs), attention, and social self-control over time. Using data from the ECLS-K:2011 (N = 18,174), findings indicated that regular…

Young children often endorse stereotypes--such as "girls are bad at math." We explore one mechanism through which these beliefs may be transmitted: via pragmatic inference. Specifically, we ask whether preschoolers and adults can learn about an unmentioned social group from what is said about another group, and if this inferential…

Infants' prelinguistic vocalizations reliably organize vocal turn-taking with social partners, creating opportunities for learning to produce the sound patterns of the ambient language. This social feedback loop supporting early vocal learning is well-documented, but its developmental origins have yet to be addressed. When do infants learn that…

The ability to perceive approximate numerosity is present in many animal species, and emerges early in human infants. Later in life, it is moderately heritable and associated with mathematical abilities, but the etiology of the Approximate Number System (ANS) and its degree of independence from other cognitive abilities in infancy is unknown.…

Exposure to childhood adversity is common and associated with a host of negative developmental outcomes. The most common approach used to examine the consequences of adversity exposure is a cumulative risk model. Recently, we have proposed a novel approach, the dimensional model of adversity and psychopathology (DMAP), where different dimensions…

Increased focus on resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) and the use and accessibility of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have advanced knowledge on the interconnected nature of neural substrates underlying executive function (EF) development in adults and clinical populations. Less is known about the relationship between rsFC…

In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…

Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive…

Sustained attention (SA) is an endogenous form of attention that emerges in infancy and reflects cognitive engagement and processing. SA is critical for learning and has been measured using different methods during screen-based and interactive contexts involving social and nonsocial stimuli. How SA differs by measurement method, context, and…

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and…

Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western…