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…

An increasing number of findings suggest that cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experiences. Research suggests that fine motor skills (FMS) link to cognitive abilities. Existing studies, however, lack conceptual and methodological differentiation regarding FMS and little is known about the directional nature of links. In study 1, we measured…

The acquisition of theory of mind (ToM) -- the ability to attribute mental states to explain others' behaviors -- is a critical milestone in children's cognitive development. Previous research has established that deaf children experience significant delays in ToM compared to hearing children within the same culture. However, prior studies were…

Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

The Electric Maze Task (EMT) is a novel planning task designed to allow flexible testing of planning abilities across a broad age range and to incorporate manipulations to test underlying planning abilities, such as working-memory and inhibitory control skills. The EMT was tested in a group of 63 typically developing 7- to 12-year-olds.…

We examine the contributions of the environmental context on cognitive development in a representative sample of children (24-59 month-olds) in Nicaragua. Multivariate regression models revealed that children who experienced high levels of structure in the home, encountered more social interaction, and were enrolled in early education programs,…

Human visual object recognition is multifaceted and comprised of several domains of expertise. Developmental relations between young children's letter recognition and their 3-dimensional object recognition abilities are implicated on several grounds but have received little research attention. Here, we ask how preschoolers' success in recognizing…

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…

A simple "expression" account of the relation between executive function (EF) and children's developing theory of mind (ToM) has difficulty accounting for the generality of the changes occurring in children's mental-state understanding during the preschool years. The current study of preschool children (N = 43) showed that EF--especially…

The present research explores the role of inhibitory control (IC) in young preschoolers' pretense ability using an ego depletion paradigm. In Experiment 1 (N = 56), children's pretense ability was assessed either before or after participating in conflict IC or control tasks, and in Experiment 2 (N = 36), pretense ability was measured after…

Theorists have identified language as a critical contributor to children's episodic memory development, yet studies linking language and memory have had mixed results. The present study aimed to clarify the mechanisms linking language and memory and to explain the previous mixed results. Sixty-four preschool children's receptive and productive…

A landmark study by O'Neill (1996), in which 2-year-old children were found to be more likely to point toward a hidden object to help an adult who was unsighted during the hiding event than to point helpfully for an adult who had been sighted, seems to undermine the conventional assumption that children this young do not understand the…

Age-related differences in episodic memory judgments assessing recall of fact information and the source of this information were examined. The role of executive function (EF) in supporting early episodic memory ability was also explored. Four- and 6-year-old children were taught 10 novel facts from two different sources (experimenter or puppet),…

A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…