The development of human abilities stems from a complex interplay between genetic predispositions and environmental factors. Numerous studies have compared musicians with non-musicians on measures of musical and non-musical ability, frequently attributing musicians' superior performance to their training. By ignoring preexisting differences,…

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…

To illuminate individual differences in the development of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in the general population, psychometric measures are needed that can capture general population-level symptom variation reliably, validly, and comparably from childhood through to the transition to adulthood. The ADHD subscale of the…

Longitudinal measurement enables the examination of behavioral or psychological change. One approach to examining longitudinal measurements is the use of latent growth curve modeling (LGCM). This approach affords the assessment of inter- and intraindividual change. Yet, this approach likely is underused in exercise science. The purpose of the…

Learning the meanings of Arabic numerals involves mapping the number symbols to mental representations of their corresponding, approximate numerical quantities. It is often assumed that performance on numerical tasks, such as number line estimation (NLE), is primarily driven by translating from a presented numeral to a mental representation of its…

Purpose: This study examined whether children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD) could use distributional information in an artificial language to learn about grammatical category membership similarly to their typically developing (TD) peers and whether developmental differences existed within and between DLD and TD groups.…

Growth, maturation, and development dominate the daily lives of children and adolescents for approximately the first 2 decades of life. Growth and maturation are biological processes, while development is largely a behavioral process. The 3 processes occur simultaneously and interact. They can be influenced by physical activity and also can…

Criteria for defining event-frequency encoding as automatic were assessed in two experiments involving young children, college students, elderly, and mentally retarded persons. The first experiment used an online word-frequency task; the second used a study-test method with pictures as stimuli. (PCB)

Investigated to what extent imaginary companions are created in the diaries of adolescents. Content analysis of questionnaire responses by participants, ages 12 to 17 years (N=241), indicate that the imaginary companion was similar to the writer in many aspects. Results show that the imaginary companion was not the result of an egocentric…

Focuses on the conceptual implications of analyses of individual differences in francophone post-Piagetian research. Maintains that these analyses are preoccupied by the "American question" of measurement and method, instead of attempting a theoretical account of the issues raised by intraindividual and interindividual variability in…

This study does not support the contention that individual differences in distance running ability are primarily due to variations in cardiovascular-respiratory capacity, but that the influences of body size, body composition, and running speed should also be recognized. (MB)

Suggests ways to use dynamic systems analysis to illuminate the pluralistic and multidimensional model described by Larivee, Normandeau, and Parent (2000). Issues discussed include the characteristics of developmental transitions, such as hysteresis; nature of growth processes, such as hierarchical development or predator-prey interactions; and…

A six-year study investigated relationships between individual development and: (1) changes in aggressive expression; (2) continuities of aggressive behavior in girls and boys; and (3) convergence between self-concepts and social attributions of others in ontogeny. Participants were 220 fourth grade students who were followed from childhood…

Examined developmental changes and individual variations in the ways children use expressive information from others. Concluded that processing deficits are more probable for younger children or for children with low perceived control than for other children. (BB)