Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have…

Multifocal attention is the ability to simultaneously attend to multiple objects, and is critical for typical functioning. Although adults are able to use multifocal attention, little is known about the development of this ability. In two experiments, we investigated multifocal attention in 6-8-year-old children and adults using a child-friendly,…

Trauma can have deep impacts on children and the development of their frontal lobe. It is within the frontal lobe that executive functioning skills such as time management, work completion, and organization of materials are housed (De Bellis & Zisk, 2014; Kavanaugh et al., 2016). Symptoms outlined as executive functions are those that are also…

Mental representations of numerical magnitude are commonly thought to undergo discontinuous change over development in the form of a "representational shift." This idea stems from an apparent categorical shift from logarithmic to linear patterns of numerical estimation on tasks that involve translating between numerical magnitudes and…

This study uses geocoded address data and information about parents' economic behavior and children's development from four random-assignment welfare and anti-poverty experiments conducted during the 1990s. We find that the impacts of these welfare and anti-poverty programs on boys' and girls' developmental outcomes during the transition to early…

The Project on State-Level Child Outcomes was initiated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to examine the effects on children of waiver policies related to state welfare reform efforts prior to the passage of federal welfare reform legislation. This report details the project's examination of child well-being in the context of…