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…

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…

Studies on development and fairness judgments in resource allocations have mainly addressed the distribution of reward. However, the distribution of responsibility also requires exploration in the context of research on development and distributive justice. For an integrated understanding of reward and responsibility distributions, we briefly…

Introduction: Children born prematurely often score lower on standardized tests of language in early childhood. Less is known about longer term outcomes. This investigation considered language outcomes in pre-adolescent children born very preterm/very low birthweight, as assessed by both standardized test scores and language sample measures, and…

Infants can help and share in the second year of life. However, there is limited knowledge as to variability in these behaviors as a function of target (e.g., caregiver vs. unfamiliar adult) and the influence of caregiver support on infant prosocial behavior. Infants (N = 268, 124 female) at 1-2 years of age (M = 1.47, SD = 0.27) and again at 2-3…

A live video was used to study the development of visual self-recognition in a cross-sectional sample of 152 typically developing French children aged between 15 months to 6 years. Three reactions to a mark placed on the child's cheek without their knowledge were studied: the touch of the mark with their hand, the ocular responsiveness to the mark…

Externalizing behavior and low academic performance present key developmental challenges for school-age children, with the potential for these domains to predict each other over time, leading to worsened outcomes. Yet, previous studies have yielded inconsistent conclusions about the directional pathways between externalizing behaviors and academic…

Understanding executive functions (EFs) development is of high value to global developmental science. Recent calls for a more inclusive and equitable developmental science argue that tasks and questionnaires that are developed using only a subset of the population are not likely to be appropriate for EFs measurement in global contexts unless…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

Social cognition is a set of complex processes that mediate much of human behavior. The development of these skills is related to and interdependent on other cognitive processes, particularly inhibitory control. Brain regions associated with inhibitory control and social cognition overlap functionally and structurally, especially with respect to…

Parasympathetic nervous system functioning as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is widely used as a measure of physiological regulation. We examined developmental patterns of children's resting RSA and RSA reactivity from 2 to 15 years of age, a period of time that is marked by considerable advances in children's regulatory abilities.…

The results of studies on early competences suggest that the child's delay of gratification (DoG) ability is a major predictor of school readiness (SR). However, there are no direct data or convincing explanations as to how DoG translates into preschool children's readiness to commence school education. Aiming at a better understanding of the…

Numerous studies suggest that by elementary school, children have implicit and explicit gender stereotypes about the toys, activities, roles, and abilities associated with boys vs. girls. Furthermore, these stereotypes have been shown to affect children's goals and behaviors, leading them to pursue activities that are associated with their own…

The present longitudinal study aims at investigating the interplay between child temperament, mother-child interaction quality and child Theory of Mind (ToM) at preschool age with regard to the development of child problem behavior at school age in 115 participants. Maternal sensitivity and child temperament were assessed when children were 4…

Fine motor skills develop in childhood. In this study, we evaluate motor planning in 6- to 11-year-old children using a pegboard and midline crossing task. The results of the pegboard task showed that children modified their strategies of hand use and space use as a function of age, albeit with a transition in the 8- to 9-year-old children. The…