Recent research has highlighted the critical role in children's cognitive development of the metacognitive support parents give their children during everyday interactions. Our main goal was to examine whether parents made consistent use of metacognitive talk across different parent - child interaction contexts and to document the effect of this…

Children are limited in visual search accuracy and this ability increases from childhood to adolescence. Developmental limitations in visual search could be related to children's difficulties in efficiently planning and executing their search, often assessed with cancellation tasks. However, few studies have examined age-related changes in visual…

Mixed-effects models are an analytic technique for modeling repeated measurement or nested data. This paper explains the logic of mixed-effects modeling and describes two examples of mixed-effects analyses using R. The intended audience of the paper is psychologists who specialize in cognitive development research. Therefore, the concepts and…

For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

As in other subfields of psychology, developmental science faces a long-standing problem of limited diversity in research participants. This issue especially raises concerns when researchers make unwarranted broad claims about their results, such as using generic language that implies that a finding is unvarying and applies across participants and…

Pretend play is often hypothesized in a global sense to be an effective context for young children's learning, but there is much still to learn about whether all types of information can be learned equally and whether all types of pretend play are equally beneficial. The present study tests whether preschoolers can learn a simple, novel causal…

Number line estimation (NLE) tasks are widely used to investigate numerical cognition, learning, and development, and as an instructional tool. Interpretation of these tasks generally involves an implicit expectation that responses are driven by the overall magnitudes of target numerals, in the sense that the particular digits conveying those…

Previous research has demonstrated a link between children's ability to name canonical finger configurations and their mathematical abilities. This study aimed to investigate the nature of this association, specifically exploring whether the relationship is skill and handshape specific and identifying the underlying mechanisms involved.…

Between the ages of 3 and 5, children develop greater control over attention to visual dimensions. Children develop the ability to flexibly shift between visual dimensions and to selectively process specific dimensions of an object. Previous proposals have suggested that selective and flexible attention is developmentally related to one another.…

Problem solving is an important cognitive skill that children use to plan and navigate various developmental and social tasks. Although previous research was theory-grounded and systematic, to our knowledge, no research has observed and documented children's problem solving as a primary objective in naturalistic developmental contexts, such as…

A growing body of research has found a relationship between parenting and the development of executive function in young children; however, fewer studies have examined how parenting is related specifically to the development of working memory. Using data from the Family Life Project, this study examined whether attention was a pathway through…

In four experiments, we investigate how the ability to detect irrelevant explanations develops. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4- to 8-year-olds and adults rated different types of explanations about "what makes cars go" individually, in the absence of a direct contrast. Each explanation was true and relevant (e.g., "Cars have engines that…

Recent research has shown that from early in development, children selectively form new beliefs in response to information supplied by others. However, little is known about the development of selective revision of existing beliefs in response to socially conveyed information. Such selective social belief revision has been extensively studied by…

When reasoning about a representation (e.g., a toy lion), children often engage in "iconic realism," whereby representations are reported to have properties of their real-life referents. The present studies examined an inverse difficulty that we dub "representational disregard": overlooking (i.e., disregarding) a…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…