The present study longitudinally investigated proportional reasoning abilities in early elementary school before the start of its instruction. Three aims were put forward: (a) distinguishing the different developmental states in young children's understanding of missing-value proportional situations, (b) investigating how children transition…

A good deal of research purports that bilingualism has a positive effect on some aspects of cognitive functioning. However, this effect is not consistent, and little research examines trajectories of cognitive skill development in bilingual children. Moreover, it remains unclear whether different types of bilingualism impact how cognitive…

Using landmarks and other scene features to recall locations from new viewpoints is a critical skill in spatial cognition. In an immersive virtual reality task, we asked children 3.5-4.5 years old to remember the location of a target using various cues. On some trials they could use information from their own self-motion. On some trials they could…

Object construction involves organizing multiple objects into a unified structure (e.g., stacking blocks into a tower) and may provide infants with unique spatial information. Because object construction entails placing objects in spatial locations relative to one another, infants can acquire information about spatial relations during construction…

Spatial scaling is an integral aspect of many spatial tasks that involve symbol-to-referent correspondences (e.g., map reading, drawing). In this study, we asked 3-6-year-olds and adults to locate objects in a two-dimensional spatial layout using information from a second spatial representation (map). We examined how scaling factor and reference…

Spatial cognition and memory are critical cognitive skills underlying foraging behaviors for all primates. While the emergence of these skills has been the focus of much research on human children, little is known about ontogenetic patterns shaping spatial cognition in other species. Comparative developmental studies of nonhuman apes can…

To examine the development of visual short-term memory (VSTM) for location, we presented 6- to 12-month-old infants (N = 199) with two side-by-side stimulus streams. In each stream, arrays of colored circles continually appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. In the "changing" stream, the location of one or more items changed in each cycle; in the…

The potential effect of gender on intellectual abilities remains controversial. The purpose of this research was to analyze gender differences in cognitive test performance among children from continuous age groups. For this purpose, the normative data from 7 domains of the newly developed neuropsychological test battery, the Evaluacion…

Aim: To describe neuropsychological disturbances and the developmental course associated with cerebellar cortical dysplasia (CCD). Method: The neuroimaging findings from 10 children (five males, five females; aged 3-10y) with CCD were reviewed and classified. These children all underwent clinical neurological examination and neuropsychological…

Aim: Posterior fossa strokes account for about 10% of ischaemic strokes in children. Although motor and dysautonomic symptoms are common, to our knowledge cognitive and affective deficits have not been described in the paediatric literature. Our aim, therefore, was to describe these symptoms and deficits. Method: In a retrospective study, we…

Sex differences in the latent general and broad abilities underlying the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children-Second Edition (KABC-II) were investigated for children and youth ages 6 through 18. The data were split into different age groups to account for changes due to differential development. Multi-group higher-order analysis of mean and…

Studies of the development of mental rotation have yielded conflicting results, apparently because different mental rotation tasks draw on different cognitive abilities. Children may compare two stimuli at different orientations without mental rotation if the stimuli contain orientation-free features. Two groups of children (78 6-year-olds and 92…

Background: Recent reports showed that children born with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) are at greater risk of experiencing verbal short-term memory span (STM) deficits that may impede their learning capacities at school. It is still unknown whether these deficits are modality dependent. Methods: This long-term, prospective design study…

Although research has focused primarily on the wide range of variability in the cognitive phenotype between individuals with velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS), we know relatively little about the extent to which within-individual expressions of the cognitive phenotype remain stable throughout development. General cognitive functioning in the low…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder associated with severe visuocognitive impairment. Individuals with WS also report difficulties with everyday wayfinding. To study the development of body-, environment-, and object-based spatial frames of reference in WS, we tested 45 children and adults with WS on a search task in which the participant…