Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds (n = 70) and adults (n = 89) evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body…

Using concepts and tools of a dynamical system approach in order to understand motor coordination underlying graphomotor skills, the aim of the current study was to establish whether the basic coordination dynamics found in adults is already established in children at elementary school, when handwriting is trained and eventually acquired. In the…

The exhibition of actions that are causally unnecessary to the outcomes with which they are associated is a core feature of human cultural behavior. To enter into the world(s) of their cultural in-group, children must learn to assimilate such unnecessary actions into their own behavioral repertoire. Past research has established the habitual…

Mothers' actions are more enthusiastic, simple, and repetitive when demonstrating novel object properties to their infants than to adults, a behavioral modification called "infant-directed action" by Brand and colleagues (2002). The current study tested whether fathers also tailor their behavior when interacting with infants and whether this…

The goal of this study was to evaluate the claim that young children display preferences for auditory stimuli over visual stimuli. This study was motivated by concerns that the visual stimuli employed in prior studies were considerably more complex and less distinctive than the competing auditory stimuli, resulting in an illusory preference for…

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and…

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction…

Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the…

Objective: This study aimed to identify the pathways through which a preventive intervention targeting young low-SES disruptive boys could result in lower crime involvement during adulthood. Method: The preventive intervention was implemented when the children were between 7 and 9 years and included three components (i.e. social skills, parental…

The change detection task has been used in dozens of studies with adults to measure visual working memory capacity. Two studies have recently tested children in this task, suggesting a gradual increase in capacity from 5 years to adulthood. These results contrast with findings from an infant looking paradigm suggesting that capacity reaches…

The ability to learn a route through a virtual environment was assessed in 19 older children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and 40 typically developing (TD) children aged 6-9 years. In addition to comparing route-learning ability across groups, we were interested in whether participants show an adult-like differentiation between "useful"…

Background: Youth diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often show deficits in cognitive control processes, potentially contributing to characteristic difficulties monitoring and regulating behavior. Modification of performance following conflict can be measured by examining conflict adaptation, the adjustment of cognitive resources based…

The current study tests whether propositions set forth in an evolutionary model of temperament (Korte, Koolhaas, Wingfield, & McEwen, 2005) may enhance our understanding of children's differential susceptibility to unsupportive and harsh caregiving practices. Guided by this model, we examined whether children's behavioral strategies for coping…

Background: While associations between conduct disorder (CD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and interpersonal callousness (IC) symptoms and delinquency onset are well established, less is known about whether these characteristics differentiate desisting and persisting delinquency. The current…

Although children with language impairments, including those associated with reading, usually demonstrate deficits in phonological processing, there is minimal agreement as to the source of those deficits. This study examined two problems hypothesized to be possible sources: either poor auditory sensitivity to speech-relevant acoustic properties,…