Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

The aim of this study was to analyze the development of Perceptual Inhibition (PI) and Selective Visual Attention (SVA) across lifespan, identifying key moments of change in the direction of development. A total of 810 Argentinian participants, ranging from 6-80 years, were included. The results revealed that PI and SVA followed similar patterns,…

Children learning a verb may benefit from hearing it across situations . At the same time, in everyday contexts, situations in which a verb is heard will be interrupted by distracting events. Using Structural Alignment theory as a framework, Study 1 asks whether children can learn a verb when irrelevant, interleaved events are present. Two½- and…

We aimed to longitudinally examine how symbolic distancing affects preschool children's delay tolerance in a delay choice task. We presented children with choices between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward in conditions with either symbolic stimuli or edible rewards. Overall, symbolic distancing modulated children's delay…

Recent evidence in adults indicates that object perceptual processing is affected by the competition between action representations. In the absence of a specific motor plan, reachable objects associated with distinct structural (grasping) and functional (using) actions (e.g., calculator) elicit slower judgments than objects associated with similar…

Our ability to shift from current to alternative (e.g., past and future) perspectives (i.e., "self-projection") plays a fundamental role in accurate decision-making. We investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' ability to shift perspective to reason about their future and past preferences. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), children were presented…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

Inhibitory control is a core executive function that develops during childhood and is measured with tasks that require the inhibition of a dominant response. The current study examined the diagnostic value of using response accuracy and latency in a simple inhibitory control test, the computerized Pointing-Stroop Task (cPST), for kindergarten…

When hearing an object label, a specific object may come to mind. With the phrase, "There was a balloon in the pack/air" the representation of balloon varies based on the implied shape (deflated vs. inflated). The current study investigated whether the implied shape affects sentence-picture verification for adults and preschool children.…

Numerous studies suggest that by elementary school, children have implicit and explicit gender stereotypes about the toys, activities, roles, and abilities associated with boys vs. girls. Furthermore, these stereotypes have been shown to affect children's goals and behaviors, leading them to pursue activities that are associated with their own…

This study investigated developmental differences in metacognitive monitoring and control in younger (5- to 6-year-old) and older (8- to 10-year-old) children's prospective memory (PM). Metacognitive monitoring was assessed by asking the children to judge their performance before (prediction) and after (postdiction) performing a resource-demanding…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) task is a widely used measure of preschoolers' executive function. We combined data for 3,290 3-year-olds from 37 unique studies reporting 130 experimental conditions. Using raw pass/fail counts, we computed the pass rates and chi-squared value for each against chance (50/50) performance. We grouped data…

Children's lexical processing speed at 18 to 25 months of age has been linked to concurrent and later language abilities. In the current study, we extend this finding to children aged 36 months. Children (N = 126) participated in a lexical processing task in which they viewed two static images on noun trials (e.g., an ear of corn and a hat), or…

According to the executive framework of prospective memory (PM), age-related differences in PM performance are mediated by age-related differences in executive functioning (EF). The present study further explored this framework by examining which specific components of EF are associated with PM differences between and within three age groups. A…