As they learn to navigate the social world, children construct frameworks to interpret others' behavior. The present studies examined two such frameworks: a mentalistic framework, which construes behavior as driven by internal mental states; and a normative framework, which presumes people act in accordance with social norms. Participants included…

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…

Humans routinely use external thinking tools, like pencil and paper, maps, and calculators, to solve cognitive problems that would have once been solved internally. As many youth face unprecedented exposure to increasingly capable technological aids, there is a growing pressure to understand children's cognitive offloading capacities and…

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what…

This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

Purpose: This study evaluated the relationship between "emotional regulation" (ER) and adverse impact related to stuttering across the developmental spectrum, in preschool and school-age children, adolescents, and adults who stutter. An additional aim examined how these variables relate to the ways that individuals approach speaking…

The late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential reflecting affective processing, may exhibit developmental shifts in magnitude and scalp location. In the present longitudinal study, 501 youth (47.3% female; 89.4% White; 12.0% Hispanic) completed the emotion interrupt task to elicit the LPP to neutral, positive, and negative images at…

Embodied Cognition approaches suggest that movements influence the understanding of abstract concepts such as time. It follows that moving the arms as watch hands should boost children's learning to read the clock. In a school setting, we compared three learning conditions: an embodied (movement) condition, an interactive App condition, and a text…

It is said that our species use mnemonics -- that "magic of memorization" -- to engrave an enormous amount of information in the brain. Yet, it is unclear how mnemonics affect memory and what the neural underpinnings are. In this electroencephalography study, we examined the hypotheses whether mnemonic training improved…

Previous research suggests that children's ability to label visual features (e.g. "red") and dimensions (e.g. "color") impacts attention to visual dimensions. The goal of this study is to investigate variations in the quality of the neural system supporting dimensional label comprehension and production in relation to…

In this article, I argue for the value of participatory methodologies, in research with children, which aims to privilege their epistemologies and living experiences in relation to the nature of self. Researching self with children raises questions about the mainstream materialist paradigm which holds hegemony over most academic disciplines --…

Children with gifted intellects often earn lower scores on measures of processing speed than their nongifted counterparts. However, neuropsychological research indicates such a profile of scores is likely not due to a true innate neurocognitive processing speed deficit but is rather a statistical artifact resulting from the interference of common…

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the…

Impaired numerosity perception in developmental dyscalculia (low "number acuity") has been interpreted as evidence of reduced representational precision in the neurocognitive system supporting non-symbolic number sense. However, recent studies suggest that poor numerosity judgments might stem from stronger interference from non-numerical…

Applying 10 Hz ([alpha]-rate) sensory stimulation, not 5 Hz ([theta]-rate), prior to introducing novel speech-print pairs can reset the phase of [theta] oscillations and enhance associative learning. This rapid gain indicates coordinated mechanisms to regulate attentional/cognitive resources ([alpha] oscillations) and facilitate memory storage…