Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not…

HIV-exposed uninfected (HEU) children during the preschool and early school ages may be at-risk for neurodevelopmental challenges due to in utero and perinatal exposure to HIV and/or antiretroviral (ARV) medications. HEU children and HIV-unexposed uninfected (HUU) children from the community were recruited and tested at 3 to 4 and 5 to 6 years of…

Little is known about how children's value priorities develop over time. This study identifies children's value priority profiles and follows their development during middle childhood. Australian children (N = 609; ages 5-12 at Time 1) reported their values over 2 years. Latent Transition Analysis indicated four profiles: Social-Focus, Self-Focus,…

Anger is a central characteristic of negative affect and is relatively stable from infancy onward. Absolute levels of anger typically peak in early childhood and diminish as children become socialized and better able to regulate emotions. From infancy to school age, however, there are also individual differences in rank-order levels of anger. For…

The human brain is plastic -- which means the brain changes its connectivity and even its structure in response to learning. This brief report highlights the following points: (1) A human's first learning experiences are foundational for later education, and experiences in the early years of life can greatly impact on later achievement; (2) Waves…

The general gender discourse has currently revealed gender gaps as early as at preschool age. To analyze developmental differences between boys and girls in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, n = 4,251 preschoolers aged 48-83 months were examined by means of the 'Dortmund Developmental Screening for Preschools 3-6' (DESK 3-6). Using the…

Multitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation…

Purpose: The early identification of motor coordination challenges before school age may enable close monitoring of a child's development and perhaps ameliorate some of the social, psychological and behavioral sequela that often accompany unrecognized Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). The purpose of this study was to develop and assess…

This paper reviews the use of eye tracking measures (saccades, smooth-pursuit eye movements, fixations during scene and face perception, and pupillary dilation) to study typical and clinical populations of children and adolescents and evaluates the use of these measures. The studies are evaluated with a focus on points that may be of general…

Investigates the development of an understanding of gender labels in toddlers by systematically varying the ages of pictured stimulus children. Results indicate that gender discrimination improved with age, but there was no evidence that the age of the stimulus children had an influence on labeling accuracy. (JS)

Finds support for the global trend hypothesis which posits that cognitive processing speed changes as a function of age and all component processes change at the same rate. (PCB)

Examined relationships between three components of tasks used in developmental studies of attention--visual search, filtering, and priming--as measured in tasks performed by children and adults. (PCB)

Recounts 3 experiments providing evidence against 2 interpretations of previous research findings that explicit memory develops substantially from 3 years of age to adulthood while implicit memory remains stable. Argues that the implicit-explicit memory developmental dissociation reflects differences in strategic processing (strategy use and…

Examined four and seven year olds' recall of standard features of a repeated event as opposed to features that deviated from that event. Younger children had more difficulty determining which features occurred in the events. Concludes that younger children organize their memory for general and specific event episodes differently than older…