The development of skills related to executive function (EF) in infancy, including their emergence, underlying neural mechanisms, and interconnections to other cognitive skills, is an area of increasing research interest. Here, we report on findings from a multidimensional dataset demonstrating that infants' behavioral performance on a flexible…

Purpose: The importance of metacognitive awareness in learning, on the one hand, and the necessity of considering demographic variables, on the other hand, have encouraged the researchers to conduct this research. This research aims to initially determine the relationship between the level of metacognitive awareness and demographic variables of…

The storage of information in external tools (e.g., notebook, cellphone) has become increasingly common. Some researchers have defined this behavior as cognitive offloading, which is a type of learning strategy. Studies have indicated that as age increases, children become increasingly capable of calibrating their learning strategies according to…

Implicit learning theories suggest that we update syntactic knowledge based on prior experience (e.g., Chang et al., 2006). To determine the limits of the extent to which implicit learning can influence syntactic processing, we investigated whether structural priming effects persist up to 1 month postexposure, and whether they persist less long in…

Background: When watching educational online videos, learners need to determine whether the videos' contents are suitable for learning. Whereas this may induce metacognitive monitoring processes, it may also distract learners from the learning materials. Objectives: In the current set of experiments, we investigated whether asking participants to…

In early childhood, young children frequently engage in object-oriented play. According to cultural-historical activity theory, object-oriented play provides children with opportunities to learn about the characteristics and cultural applications of objects and materials. These characteristics are referred to as rules or affordances of objects and…

Meaningfulness and prior knowledge can have differing effects on both metamemory and memory performance. Personally relevant information may be deemed more meaningful, which often can serve as a mediating factor in memory performance. Additionally, information that is congruent with prior knowledge has been shown to be judged as easier to remember…

The neural bases of cognition may be greatly informed by relating temporally defined developmental changes in behavior with concurrent alterations in neural function. A robust improvement in performance in spatial learning and memory tasks occurs at 3 wk of age in rodents. We reported that the developmental increase of spontaneous alternation in a…

Group membership is a strong driver of everyday life in humans, influencing similarity judgments, trust choices, and learning processes. However, its ontogenetic development remains to be understood. This study investigated how group membership, age, sex, and identification with a team influenced 39- to 60-month-old children (N = 94) in a series…

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to repeat syntactic structures across sentences. We investigated the extent to which structural priming persists with age and whether the effect depends upon highly abstract syntactic representations that only encompass the global sentence structure or whether representations are specified for…

During the first 5 years of life, the versatility, breadth, and fidelity with which children imitate change dramatically. Currently, there is no model to explain what underlies such significant changes. To that end, the present study examined whether task-independent but domain-specific--elemental--imitation mechanism explains performance across…

In the present research, we provide empirical evidence for the process of symbolic integration of number associations, focusing on the development of simple addition (e.g., 5 + 3 = 8), subtraction (e.g., 5 - 3 = 2), and multiplication (e.g., 5 × 3 = 15). Canadian children were assessed twice, in Grade 2 and Grade 3 (N = 244; 55% girls). All…

Calls to diversify second language acquisition (SLA) (e.g., Ortega, 2013) have led to increased interest in multilingualism and inclusion of groups less represented in samples of university students, such as individuals at older ages. Nevertheless, we still have more questions than we do answers. This article outlines a research agenda targeting…

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality…

Infants, children and adults are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment through statistical learning (SL), an implicit learning mechanism that is considered to have an important role in language acquisition. Research over the past 20 years has shown that SL is present from very early infancy and found in a variety of tasks…