Twenty-four 3.5-year-old children who initially showed poor performance on false-belief tasks participated in a training protocol designed to promote performance on these tasks. Our aim was to determine whether the extent to which children benefited from training was predicted by their performance on a battery of executive functioning tasks.…

The current study examined the role of preschoolers' motivation, operationalized as persistence, in the formation of language and math skills at kindergarten. The participants were 263 children from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Demographic information, child persistence, and early cognitive-linguistic skills were assessed at…

Socioeconomic status is an important predictor of cognitive development and academic achievement. Late adolescence provides a unique opportunity to study how the attainment of socioeconomic status (in the form of years of education) relates to cognitive and neural development, during a time when age-related cognitive and neural development is…

The authors examined effects of feedback and explanation on false belief performance. Thirty-three children (42-54 months; 15 girls, 18 boys) were randomly assigned to four treatment conditions: explanation, feedback, feedback researcher explains, and feedback child explains. Children completed false belief tasks during pretraining, 8 training…

Executive functions are a set of high cognitive abilities that control and regulate other functions and behaviors and are crucial for successful adaptation. Deficits in executive functions are frequently described in developmental disorders, which are characterized by disadaptive behavior. However, executive functions are not widely examined in…

Although the importance of healthy mental development in children and youth is not disputed, the mental health needs of far too many Canadian children are being ignored. Within the context of recent federal and provincial calls for systemic reform of the mental health care systems for children and youth, we underscore the necessity for ongoing…

In this article, the authors provide an overview of the consequences of war, terrorism, and disaster on children's physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. Next, they discuss the "resiliency promoting" strategies that adults who work with children may employ prior to and after a catastrophic event. The article concludes with…

Background: Intra-individual variability reflects temporal variation within an individual's performance on a cognitive task. Children with developmental disorders, such as ADHD and ASD show increased levels of intra-individual variability. In typical development, intra-individual variability decreases sharply between the ages 6 and 20. The tight…

College students' implicit theories (or mindsets) about intelligence can affect not only their motivations toward learning, but also their cognitive habits and behaviors while learning thus impacting academic achievement. In this paper we describe learning experiences we used with our learning community to 1) introduce students to the concept of…

This study investigates how shared picture book storytelling within a peer-group setting could stimulate causal reasoning in children aged 4½ to 6 years. Twenty-eight children from preschool classes of three schools were allocated to one of six groups (four to five children per group). Each group participated in six storytelling sessions over a…

Adolescence is a time of significant physical, social, and emotional developments, accompanied by changes in cognitive and language skills. Underlying these are significant developments in brain structures and functions including changes in cortical and subcortical gray matter and white matter tracts. Among the brain regions that develop during…

The contrast between social constructivism and cognitive constructivism are depicted in different ways in many studies. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the evolution of constructivism and put a focus on social constructivism from the perception of Vygotsky. This study provides a general idea of the evolution of constructivism for people…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of five variations of imagery and physical practice on learning of Basketball free throws in adolescents with mental retardation (AWMR). Forty AWMR were randomly assigned to five groups and performed a variation of practice: physical practice, mental practice, physical practice followed by…

Two studies examined how children between ages 4 and 6 use body shape (i.e., the waist-to-hip-ratio [WHR]) for sex categorization. In Study 1 (N = 73), 5- and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, selected bodies with increasingly discrepant WHRs to be "most like a man" and "most like a woman." Similarly, sex category judgments made by 5- and…

Recent research suggests that witnessing events of fission (e.g., the splitting of a solid object) impairs human infants', human adults', and non-human primates' object representations. The present studies investigated the reactions of gorillas and orangutans to cohesion violation across different types of fission events implementing a behavioral…