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…

Children's responses to new, unfamiliar social interactions should be influenced by their cognitive appraisals and physiology, though little is known about how these constructs interrelate. To investigate these links, we examined whether children's appraisals of recalled events and resting parasympathetic physiology predicted social…

The present study explored the relationship between biological motion (BioM) processing, motor skills, and autistic traits within a non-clinical sample of 621 adults (18-73 years, 51.8% female). Results indicated that adults with greater autistic traits also endorsed difficulties associated with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) in…

The ability to infer intentions from observed behavior and predict actions based on this inference, known as intention attribution (IA), has been hypothesized to be impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The underlying neural processes, however, have not been conclusively determined. The aim of this study was to examine the…

We studied the role of sensorimotor and working memory systems in supporting development of perceptual rhythm processing with 119 participants aged 7-12 years. Children were assessed for their abilities in sensorimotor synchronization (SMS; beat tapping), auditory working memory (AWM; digit span), and rhythm discrimination (RD; same/different…

Children have traditionally been viewed as less reliable witnesses than are adults. More recently, a concept known as developmental reversals, has brought this view into question. Developmental reversals have demonstrated that in certain contexts, children produce fewer false memories than adults. The primary paradigm used to demonstrate…

Purpose: Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has situated predictive processing--the anticipation of upcoming percepts--as a dominant function of the brain. The purpose of this article is to argue that prediction should feature more prominently in explanatory accounts of sentence processing and comprehension deficits in developmental…

Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have mental states that drive their actions and that those mental states can be different from one's own. Without understanding theory of mind and being able to take others' perspectives, it could be difficult for children to read and understand narrative texts. This paper posits that…

Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have mental states that drive their actions and that those mental states can be different from one's own. Without understanding theory of mind and being able to take others' perspectives, it could be difficult for children to read and understand narrative texts. This paper posits that…

Theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute beliefs to oneself and others. The present study used a dynamic systems approach to assess how environment may affect the development of second-order theory of mind (e.g., "John knows that Mary knows that he went out yesterday"). Theory of mind is divided into two major dimensions:…

The current study examined the incremental validity of the Luria interpretive scheme for the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children-Second Edition (KABC-II) for predicting scores on the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Second Edition (KTEA-II). All participants were children and adolescents (N = 2,025) drawn from the nationally…

Literature has shown the importance of social cognition for emotional wellness. However, to our knowledge, few studies so far investigated the relationship between social cognition and anxiety in childhood. No study systematically examined social cognition in relation to specific domains of anxiety. By a correlational design and multivariate…

In natural language, evidence suggests that, while some rules are productive (regular), applying broadly to new words, others are restricted to a specific set of lexical items (irregular). Further, the literature suggests that children make a categorical distinction between regular and irregular rules, applying only regular rules productively…

Representations of numerical value have been assessed by using bounded (e.g., 0-1,000) and unbounded (e.g., 0-?) number-line tasks, with considerable debate regarding whether 1 or both tasks elicit unique cognitive strategies (e.g., addition or subtraction) and require unique cognitive models. To test this, we examined how well a mixed log-linear…

Previous research suggests that individuals with developmental dyslexia perform below typical readers on non-linguistic cognitive tasks involving the learning and encoding of statistical-sequential patterns. However, the neural mechanisms underlying such a deficit have not been well examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the…