The current research study investigated the patterns of reading strategies employed by English/French bilingual adults and children in both languages. An in-depth analysis of patterns of strategy use was conducted on a subset of skilled readers and poor readers from previous data sets. Think-aloud data on short passages revealed that, overall,…

We explore how children and adults actively experiment within the physical world to achieve different epistemic goals. In our experiment, one hundred one 4- to 10-year-old children and 24 adults either passively observed or used a touchscreen interface to actively interact with objects in a dynamic physical microworld with the goal of inferring…

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Individuals track probabilities, such as associations between events in their environments, but less is known about the degree to which experience--within a learning session and over development--influences people's use of incoming probabilistic information to guide behavior in real time. In two experiments, children (4-11 years) and adults…

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and…

Sotos syndrome is a congenital overgrowth disorder with an incidence of approximately 1 in 14,000. This study investigated behavioural characteristics of ASD within a large cohort of individuals with Sotos syndrome (n = 78). As measured by the Social Responsiveness Scale, second edition (SRS-2), 65 participants (83.33%) met clinical cut-off…

Background: Adaptation is key to survival. An organism must adapt to environmental challenges in order to be able to thrive in the environment in which they find themselves. Resilience can be thought of as a measure of the ability of an organism to adapt, and to withstand challenges to its stability. In higher animals, the brain is a key player in…

Youth in pain often show self-defeating and destructive patterns of behavior which should be seen as calls for help and positive support. Instead, deep-seated brain programs and cultural beliefs about discipline can trigger angry or avoidant behavior by adults who deal with these young people. This brief introduction to the Conflict Cycle…

Background: While associations between conduct disorder (CD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and interpersonal callousness (IC) symptoms and delinquency onset are well established, less is known about whether these characteristics differentiate desisting and persisting delinquency. The current…

Eye gaze plays a pivotal role during communication. When interacting deceptively, it is commonly believed that the deceiver will break eye contact and look downward. We examined whether children's gaze behavior when lying is consistent with this belief. In our study, 7- to 15-year-olds and adults answered questions truthfully ("Truth" questions)…

Three- and 4-year-old children were asked to judge which of a set of 3 lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among adult informants. Children were invariably accurate when making independent judgments but sometimes deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Nevertheless, the deference displayed by both age…

Background: Clinical heterogeneity of autism likely hinders efforts to find genes associated with this complex psychiatric disorder. Some studies have produced promising results by restricting the sample according to the expression of specific familial factors or components of autism. Previous factor analyses of the restricted, repetitive…

Homosexual adults tend to be more gender nonconforming than heterosexual adults in some of their behaviors, feelings, and interests. Retrospective studies have also shown large differences in childhood gender nonconformity, but these studies have been criticized for possible memory biases. The authors studied an indicator of childhood gender…

This article had four goals. First, the authors identified a set of general challenges and questions that a life-span theory of development should address. Second, they presented a comprehensive account of their Motivational Theory of Life-Span Development. They integrated the model of optimization in primary and secondary control and the…