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…

During the preschool years, children are simultaneously undergoing a reshaping of their mental number line and becoming increasingly sensitive to the social norms expressed by those around them. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old American and Israeli children were given a task in which an experimenter laid out chips with numbers (1-5),…

This study aimed to explore the possible indirect pathway between maternal reminiscing style and child socioemotional functioning (prosocial behaviors and emotional adjustment difficulties) through children's autobiographical memory (elaboration and specificity). A secondary exploratory aim was to examine whether cultural context moderated these…

The present study examined how culture and gender influence the self-construal of mothers and their four-year-olds during dyadic reminiscing. Participants were 21 Thai (11 girls, 10 boys) and 21 American (10 girls, 11 boys) mother-child dyads. Thai dyads exhibited a more interdependent self-construal, whereas American dyads exhibited a more…

Although laboratory studies have examined the development of children's prospective memory (PM) and the factors that influence its performance, much less is known about children's PM performance and development in their everyday life. The current study used an online parent diary report approach to examine American 2- to 6-year-olds' PM successes…

Parents' elaboration plays an important role in autobiographical memory and socioemotional development. Two types of coding approaches have been used to assess parents' elaboration: a frequency-based coding (absolute frequencies of different types of elaborative utterances) and a scale-based coding (a 5-point scale based on relative frequencies of…

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…

The ability to project oneself forward in time and imagine a future episode, known as episodic foresight (EpF), is an important aspect of future thinking. EpF tasks often involve children choosing an item for a future episode, yet the degree to which future projection is required to succeed -- versus memory or semantic associations -- has been…

Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (AMS) has robust associations with psychopathology. As such, understanding the development of AMS (or its inverse, overgeneral autobiographical memory) and how it may be unique from other aspects of memory performance is important. In particular, it is unclear whether child AMS is distinct from…

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…

To adult humans, the task of forming an impression of another social being seems effortless and even obligatory. In 2 experiments, we offer the first systematic cross-cultural examination of impression formation in European American and East Asian preschool children. Children across both cultures easily inferred basic personality traits, such as…

Thirty parents observed their preschoolers (M [subscript age] = 4;2) experience a standardized laboratory event and discussed the event with their child later that day. Children's memory for this event was subsequently tested at two delay intervals. Prior to the laboratory event, parents were randomly assigned to receive either autonomy-support…

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…

Despite the well-established literature on explanation in early childhood, little is known about what constrains children's explanations. State change and negative outcomes were examined as potential explanatory biases in the domain of naïve biology, extending upon previous work in the domain of naïve physics. In two studies, preschool children…

This study investigated the longitudinal relation between children's theory of mind and their metacognitive knowledge with a special focus on the impact of language on this relation. Measures of theory-of-mind understanding and metamemory knowledge were assessed in 133 3-year-old children at 4 measurement points separated by half-year intervals.…