The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations among children's symbolic functioning at 15 months, joint attention at 24 months, expressive communication at 24 and 36 months, and executive functioning at 36 months. With the sample from rural areas in the United States collected by the Family Life Project (N = 1,008), a longitudinal data…

Stimulus over-selectivity is said to have occurred when only a limited subset of the total number of stimuli present during discrimination learning controls behavior, thus, restricting learning about the range, breadth, or all features of a stimulus. The current study investigated over-selectivity of 100 typically developing children, aged 3-7…

Two studies are presented to examine whether and why 3-5-year-olds in Pakistan display limited social understanding. Study 1 tested 71 preschoolers on Lillard and Flavell's (1992) test of desires, pretence and beliefs, plus two false belief tasks, and showed very limited understanding across these measures even though almost half were over 5 years…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…

We investigated the ability to detect a face among other visual objects in a complex visual array in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, as well as in adults. To this end, we used a visual search paradigm implemented on a touch-tablet device. Subjects (N = 100) saw up to eighty 3 × 3 visual search arrays and had to find and tap upon a target--a face…

This study investigated cross-cultural variation in the development of executive functioning (EF) across the preschool period for United States and Chinese children from low and high socioeconomic families using a longitudinal design. Participants included 216 preschool children (n = 125 from the US; n = 91 from Shanghai and Jiangxi, China). On…

This study explored unique constructs of fantasy orientation and whether there are developmental benefits for fantasy-oriented children. By age 3, children begin developing executive functions, with some children exhibiting high fantasy orientation in their cognitions and behaviors. Preschoolers ("n" = 106) completed fantasy orientation…

Moderate, yet relatively consistent, associations between cognitive performance and shyness have been reported throughout the child and adult literatures. The current study assessed longitudinal associations between cognition (i.e., executive functioning) and parent-report temperamental shyness from infancy to early childhood and used temporal…

This study examined the concurrent and predictive relations between infant attention skills, joint attention, and emotion regulation. Infants' gaze following skills and duration of orienting were assessed at 6 months of age, and collaborative joint attention and emotion regulation skills were assessed at 24 months of age. The results indicated…

During toddlerhood the ability to organise actions for accomplishing goals rapidly increases. The developmental changes in actions and self-process that become part of this motivational system have seldom been studied simultaneously. Fifty-seven toddlers between the ages of 15 and 35 months were observed for two sessions while working on mastery…