When do children develop the ability to imagine their future lives in terms of a coherent prospective life story? We investigated whether this ability develops in parallel with the ability to construct a life story for the past and narratives about single autobiographical events in the past and future. Four groups of school children aged 9 to 15…

This article offers a critique of Harry Brighouse's "autonomy-facilitating education", which aims to enable students to reflect critically on their lives and society without disposing them to do so. Because it is "character-neutral", this kind of education purportedly avoids some of the controversy surrounding autonomy-promotion. At the same time,…

Aggression in early childhood has been found to predict future psychopathology, academic problems, and delinquency. In a sample of 136 mother-child pairs (M[subscript age] = 4 years, 11 months, SD = 11 months, 58% boys) associations among mothers' responding with distress to children's negative emotions, children's emotional control, and…

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…

Adolescent stress-related growth refers to enhancement in an adolescent's cognitive-affective or social resources as a result of experiencing stressors. We tested whether adolescents reporting high levels of stress-related growth showed superior adaptation outcomes on a day-to-day basis. Participants (n = 91; females = 46, age = 14) completed a…

The majority of episodic memory (EM) tests are far removed from what we experience in daily life and from the definition of this type of memory. This study examines the developmental trajectory of the main aspects of episodic memory--what, where, and when--and of feature binding in a naturalistic virtual environment. A population of 125…

In this article, Cybele Raver and Clancy Blair explore a group of cognitive processes called executive function (EF)--including the flexible control of attention, the ability to hold information through working memory, and the ability to maintain inhibitory control. EF processes are crucial for young children's learning. On the one hand, they can…

Today, experts agree that the level of cognitive development of modern young people affects the long-term life goals and outcomes that they set for themselves. During the course of numerous studies experts have identified such key competencies as problem solving, information literacy, and critical thinking. However, there are still many unanswered…

Improvements in cognitive flexibility during the preschool years have been linked to developments in both working memory and inhibitory control, though the precise contribution of each remains unclear. In the current study, one hundred and twenty 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds completed two rule-switching tasks. In one version, children switched rules in…

The ability to attend to one among multiple sources of information is central to everyday functioning. Just as central is the ability to switch attention among competing inputs as the task at hand changes. Such processes develop surprisingly slowly, such that even into adolescence, we remain slower and more error prone at switching among tasks…

Over the past decades, there has been an ongoing debate about whether education should aim at the cultivation of emotional wellbeing of self-esteeming personalities or whether it should prioritise literacy and the cognitive development of students. However, it might be the case that the two are not easily distinguished in educational contexts. In…

You read in the paper this morning that people who take multivitamins have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to get cancer than people who don't. Does this information make you more likely to want to take multivitamins? To truly prepare students for life, schools need to teach them the critical thinking skills they need to answer questions…

Object labels are valuable communicative tools because their meanings are shared among the members of a particular linguistic community. The current research was conducted to investigate whether 13-month-old infants appreciate that object labels should not be generalized across individuals who have been shown to speak different languages. Using a…

Relations between marital conflict, children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and fluid cognitive performance were examined over 3 years to assess allostatic processes. Participants were 251 children reporting on marital conflict, baseline RSA, and RSA reactivity (RSA-R) to a lab challenge were recorded, and fluid cognitive performance…

The review by Lillard et al. (2013) highlighted the need for additional research to better clarify the nature of the relationship between pretend play and development. However, the authors did not provide a proposal for how to structure the direction of this future work. Here, we provide a possible framework for generating additional research.…