Background: When looking at faces, we tend to attend more to the left visual field (corresponding to the right side of the person's face). This phenomenon is called the left visual field bias (LVF) and is presumed to reflect the brain's right-sided dominance for face processing. Whether alterations in hemispheric dominance are present in dyslexia,…

Purpose: This study focuses on examining how individual differences, including biological, linguistic, and cognitive traits, and prosodic focus affect the computation biases and reaction time (RT) associated with quantity scalar terms in Mandarin-speaking children aged 3-8 years. Method: The participants of this study were 27 Mandarin-speaking…

Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals' pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample (n = 164) of autistic and NT children and…

The face inversion effect is an important indicator of holistic face perception and reflects the developmental level of face processing. This study examined the face inversion effect in deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) children aged 7-17 using the face dimensions task. This task uses photographic images of a face, in which configural and featural…

Purpose: Converging research suggests that speech timing, including altered rate and pausing when speaking, can distinguish autistic individuals from nonautistic peers. Although speech timing can impact effective social communication, it remains unclear what mechanisms underlie individual differences in speech timing in autism. Method: The present…

Purpose: Response times (RTs) are commonly used in studying language acquisition. However, previous research utilizing RT in the context of language has largely overlooked the intra-individual variability (IIV) of RTs, which could hold significant information about the processes underlying language acquisition. Method: We explored the association…

Observational learning is essential for the acquisition of new behavior in educational practices and daily life and serves as an important mechanism for human cognitive and social-emotional development. However, we know little about its underlying neurocomputational mechanisms from a developmental perspective. In this study we used model-based…

Cognitive tasks are seldom evaluated on their ability to provide valid and reliable measurements of the construct they intend to measure. This scarcity of psychometric evaluations makes it challenging to evaluate replications of experimental effects and to relate performance in cognitive tasks to other constructs of interest. In developmental…

The goal of the present study was to test theories about the extent to which individual differences in word reading align with those in spelling and the extent to which other cognitive and linguistic skills play different roles in word reading and spelling. Using data from 1,116 children ranging from 8 to 17 years, we modeled word reading and…

We investigated the relations between self-reported math anxiety, task difficulty, and pupil dilation in adults and very young children during math tasks of varying difficulty levels. While task difficulty significantly influenced pupillary responses in both groups, the association between self-reported math anxiety and pupil dilation differed…

On a daily basis, children make decisions about how to negotiate their physical environment. Sometimes they engage in physical tasks that involve risk, requiring them to judge the safety of how to negotiate the environment safely. Individual differences in children's age, sex, physical size, and personality may impact those decisions. We used…

Auditory selective attention forms an important foundation of children's learning by enabling the prioritisation and encoding of relevant stimuli. It may also influence reading development, which relies on metalinguistic skills including the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language. Reports of attentional impairments and speech…

Statistical learning (SL), the ability to detect and extract regularities from inputs, has been considered as an early-maturing and domain-general mechanism that is critical for typical language development. However, recent evidence in neurotypical adults and children have found that individuals can vary in their SL abilities across linguistic and…

Loneliness becomes more prevalent as youth transition from childhood into adolescence. A key underlying process may be the puberty-related increase in biological stress reactivity, which can alter social behavior and elicit conflict or social withdrawal (fight-or-flight behaviors) in some youth, but increase prosocial (tend-and-befriend) responses…

Individual differences in working memory (WM) influence reading skills. We aim to identify how different domains of WM explain reading performance, and how this association changes with age and reading expertise. Hungarian children from first to sixth grade took part in our study. The decoding skills of all children were assessed with 1-min word…