We investigated the role of distinct inhibitory processes as 4- to 6-year-olds from the Northeastern United States (N = 48, M[subscript age] = 68.27 months, 22 boys, 26 girls; 63% White, 6% Black, 4% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 8% more than one race, with 17% not reporting) and adults evaluated accurate or deceptive information from human or non-human…

Young children tend to behave more generously when their actions are identified than when they are anonymous, yet we know little about the cognitive foundations required for anonymity to impact generosity. In three studies we examined Canadian children's understanding of anonymity and its impact on sharing in anonymous and identified contexts.…

Children are limited in visual search accuracy and this ability increases from childhood to adolescence. Developmental limitations in visual search could be related to children's difficulties in efficiently planning and executing their search, often assessed with cancellation tasks. However, few studies have examined age-related changes in visual…

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to rapidly and accurately switch between tasks. It is regarded as a core dimension of executive functions and has been reported to improve during childhood and into early adulthood. For its evaluation, the task-switching paradigm is widely used. Switching between tasks or response sets imposes a series…

For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

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's storybooks often contain fantasy elements, from dragons and wizards to anthropomorphic animals that wear clothes, talk, and behave like humans. These elements can impact children's learning from storybooks both positively and negatively, perhaps due in part to their ability to capture children's interest and attention. Prior research…

The relationship between motor skills and executive functions (EFs) is gaining prominence in the field of developmental psychology. However, evidence of the motor skills--EFs link in children with typical development is somewhat inconsistent and there has been no adequate attempt to evaluate it systematically across studies. In view of this, the…

Pretend play is an important, universal activity of early childhood, but research to date contains multiple inconsistencies in definitions and measurement of pretend play. To begin to resolve this issue, we conducted a first study of the multiple different behaviors of pretend play in the preschool years (3-5 years), and investigated their…

Support (one object preventing another from falling) is linguistically encoded by adults and children in a highly structured and differentiated way, with basic locative expressions or Light verbs (e.g., in English, the block is "on/put" on the box) encoding Support-from-Below, and lexical verbs (e.g., she "stuck" the block on…

Number line estimation (NLE) tasks are widely used to investigate numerical cognition, learning, and development, and as an instructional tool. Interpretation of these tasks generally involves an implicit expectation that responses are driven by the overall magnitudes of target numerals, in the sense that the particular digits conveying those…

Developmental changes in self-regulation are theorized to underlie adolescents' engagement in risky behaviors, physical health, mental health, and transition to adulthood. Two central processes involved in self-regulation, self-management (i.e. planning, concentration, and problem-solving) and disinhibition (e.g. distractibility and impulsivity)…

It is well documented that young children have difficulties with strategically remembering past events. Recent evidence on event memory in 35- and 46-month-old children suggests that strategic retrieval (yes/no questions) improves with age, whereas spontaneous retrieval is relatively unaffected by age. We here replicate and extend those findings…

As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children's media), they may be more…

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…