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: 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…

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…

We explored the causal role of individual and age-related differences in working memory (WM) capacity in long-term memory (LTM) retrieval. Our sample of 160 participants included 120 children (6-13-years old) and 40 young adults (18-24 years). Participants performed a WM task with images of unique everyday items, presented at varying set sizes.…

Ninety-seven children aged 4-11 (49 males, 48 females, mostly White) were given the opportunity to improve their problem-solving performance by devising and implementing a novel cognitive offloading strategy. Across two phases, they searched for hidden rewards using maps that were either aligned or misaligned with the search space. In the second…

Kim and Opfer (2017) found that number-line estimates increased approximately logarithmically with number when an upper bound (e.g., 100 or 1000) was explicitly marked (bounded condition) and when no upper bound was marked (unbounded condition). Using procedural suggestions from Cohen and Ray (2020), we examined whether this logarithmicity might…

Kim and Opfer (2017) found that number-line estimates increased approximately logarithmically with number when an upper bound (e.g., 100 or 1000) was explicitly marked (bounded condition) and when no upper bound was marked (unbounded condition). Using procedural suggestions from Cohen and Ray (2020), we examined whether this logarithmicity might…

Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to…

As we listen to speech, our ability to understand what was said requires us to retrieve and bind together individual word meanings into a coherent discourse representation. This so-called semantic unification is a fundamental cognitive skill, and its development relies on the integration of neural activity throughout widely distributed functional…

We investigated the association between individual differences in metaphor understanding and Theory of Mind (ToM) in typically developing children. We distinguished between two types of metaphors and created a Physical and Mental Metaphors task, echoing a similar distinction for ToM. Nine-year-olds scored lower than older age-groups in ToM as well…

Gesture is an integral part of children's communicative repertoire. However, little is known about the neurobiology of speech and gesture integration in the developing brain. We investigated how 8- to 10-year-old children processed gesture that was essential to understanding a set of narratives. We asked whether the functional neuroanatomy of…

Diagrams are powerful opportunities for grappling with and learning abstract relationships, for example learning the relations between elements in an ecosystem rather than simply memorizing the objects within the system. Further, what is crucial from any diagrammatic learning opportunity is the ability to use this relational knowledge in a new…

Numerical comparison is a primary measure of the acuity of children's approximate number system. Approximate number system acuity is associated with key developmental outcomes such as symbolic number skill, standardized test scores, and even employment outcomes (Halberda, Mazzocco, & Feigenson, 2008; Parsons & Bynner, 1997). We examined…