The aim of this study is to compare the neurological status, developmental parameters and physical fitness of children who engage in regular physical activity in the preschool period versus those who do not. The study included 305 healthy children aged 4-6 years, consisting of 154 girls and 151 boys. In addition to evaluating the demographic…

Early experiences in STEM education can contribute to positive cognitive development in young children. When students have the opportunities to play, inquire, follow their interests/curiosities, develop STEM identities, be creative, and operate within concrete/contextualized STEM explorations, they will experience expansive cognitive growth.…

The following article is a thorough literature review, discussing the impact of media technology on brain development in the context of magical thinking. This systematic literature review discusses the impact of video gaming on magical thinking in early childhood. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how media technology, especially video…

Identifying the neural processes that underlie the association between children's early adverse experiences and cognitive development could inform more effective intervention strategies. The goal of the current study (data collected 2015-2021) was to examine relations among early experiences at 6 months, electroencephalography (EEG) theta power at…

Maternal substance use and unpredictable maternal sensory signals may affect child development, but no studies have examined them together. We explored the unpredictability, frequency and duration of maternal sensory signals in 52 Caucasian mother-child dyads, 27 with and 25 without maternal substance use. We also examined the association between…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

Parenting is widely considered to be among the most important influences on early childhood (EC) development. But to what extent and under what circumstances can EC parenting programs improve child learning outcomes? While substantial progress has been made toward addressing these questions in recent years, there have been few attempts to…

The majority of the world's children live in low- and middle-income countries, yet the majority of early childhood cognitive research is done with a small proportion of high-income countries. These findings cannot be assumed to apply across all contexts. It is therefore necessary to confront entrenched systems of power and privilege in early…

While the study of family literacy in Latino communities has grown in the U.S. since the 1990s, this is a nascent research area in Latin America, with Chile being no exception. Limited information is available about the impact of parents' literacy practice on child literacy outcomes at different developmental stages, the shared reading practices…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

Educational interventions are frequently designed to occur during early childhood, based on the idea that earlier intervention will have greater long-term academic benefits. However, surprisingly little is known about when cognitive and academic skills are most plastic, or malleable, during development. One way to study plasticity is to ask…

"Research Findings:" Despite the prevalence of integrating early childhood education (ECE) into formal schooling, there is limited evidence on how school-based ECE affects children compared to other types of ECE, particularly in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). Therefore, this study examined school-based ECE programs compared…

Previous research on children's knowledge about the mind has primarily focused on their comprehension of false beliefs, leaving the conceptualization of thoughts and thinking less explored. To address this gap, we developed a new assessment tool, the interview about the mind (IaM), to assess children's understanding of the mind. Two studies…

Children are exposed to many trace elements throughout their development. Given their ubiquity and potential to have effects on children's neurodevelopment, these exposures are a public health concern. This study sought to identify trace element mixture-associated deficits in learning behavior using operant testing in a prospective cohort. We…

A problematic way to think about social categories is to essentialize them--to treat particular differences between people as marking fundamentally distinct social kinds. From where do these beliefs arise? Language that expresses generic claims about categories elicits some aspects of essentialism, but the scope of these effects remains unclear.…