In 1951, when Maria Montessori described the pattern of human development as the Constructive Rhythm of Life, marking each of four chapters or planes of development with an inverted triangle, she colored the first and third planes red to represent their intensity (Grazzini, 1996). These two red triangles are referred to as creative periods and…

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,…

With development knowledge becomes organized according to semantic links, including early-developing associative (e.g., juicy-apple) and gradually developing taxonomic links (e.g., apple-pear). Word co-occurrence regularities may foster these links: Associative links may form from direct co-occurrence (e.g., juicy-apple), and taxonomic links from…

By 12 months of age, infants exhibit behavioral sensitivity to sound symbolism (e.g. sound-shape correspondences) when they hear universally sound symbolic pseudowords (e.g. "bouba," "kiki"). Here, we investigated whether infant's sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences is affected when they hear language-specific sound…

Developmental science suggests that the consequences of mental health problems for life-course outcomes may depend on the timing of their onset. This study investigated the extent to which mental health predicted educational attainment at ages 17, 20, and 25 and whether gender moderated the links between mental health and educational attainment.…

When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how…

Skilled reading requires the convergent brain network between spoken language and reading. Here, we examined the developmental changes in this convergent network between beginning and skilled readers. We used fMRI data from 41 adults (aged from 20 to 21 years) and 21 children (aged from 9 to 12 years) who performed a Chinese word sound matching…

Our ability to perceive our own and other people's bodies is critical to the success of social interactions. Research has shown that adults have a distorted perception of their own body and those of other adults. However, these studies ask perceivers to estimate for adults with a similar bodily make-up. This study explored the developmental…

Although much is known about adults' ability to orient by means of cognitive maps (mental representations of the environment), it is less clear when this important ability emerges in development. In the present study, 97 seven- to 10-year-olds and 26 adults played a video game designed to investigate the ability to orient using cognitive maps. The…

Purpose: Current approaches to speech production aim to explain adult behavior and so make assumptions that, when taken to their logical conclusion, fail to adequately account for development. This failure is problematic if adult behavior can be understood to emerge from the developmental process. This problem motivates the proposal of a…

The effect of time pressure on metacognitive control is of theoretical and empirical relevance and is likely to allow us to tap into developmental differences in performances which do not become apparent otherwise, as previous studies suggest. In the present study, we investigated the effect of time pressure on metacognitive control in three age…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…

The dysregulation profile (DP) in youth is characterized by severe emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dysregulation and is associated with an increased risk for psychiatric disorders. Adolescent self-regulation has important implications for adulthood outcomes, yet this association is understudied in the context of the DP in emerging adults.…

This research examined how 5-, 8-, and 11-month-olds with female primary caregivers mentally represented faces using a familiarization procedure similar to real-world experience in which infants have greater exposure to female faces aged 21-39 years than other face types. We predicted infants would form weighted representations of faces (i.e.,…

Background: Being aware of the different social expectations linked to the principal lifespan stages (i.e., childhood, adulthood, old age) is critical to an individual's inclusion in the community and to developing appropriate social behaviours. However, little research exists on this topic in the field of intellectual and developmental…