Electrophysiology is a timely and important tool in the study of early cognitive development. This commentary polishes the definition of event-related potential (ERP) components; often interpreted as expressions of mental processes. Further, attention is drawn to time-frequency analysis of the electroencephalogram (EEG) which conveys much more…

Although developmental psychologists are generally happy to endorse dissociations and gradualist views of development like Woolley's (2006), the design and interpretation of developmental research often suggests an implicit commitment to a cleaner, less dissociative, sudden-transition view of development. Such an implicit commitment may derive…

Based on stimulating findings suggesting that prenatal levels of steroids may influence cognitive functions, a study with N=40 healthy volunteers of both sexes was conducted. Prenatal levels of testosterone (T) were estimated by use of the second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) which is supposed to be controlled by the same genes involved in…

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4-7, and place…

Two experiments examined the effect of age and cognitive demands on children's choice strategies. Children aged 8-9 and 12-13 years were asked to choose among either two or four products that differed in several attributes of varying importance to them. Choice tasks were designed to differentiate between the lexicographic and the equal-weighting…

Neurological research has demonstrated that brain activity in animals originally dedicated to the production and regulation of physical activity can be decoupled from that physical activity. Furthermore, animals can use the brain activity in this new condition to achieve particular results such as moving a cursor on a screen. These findings are…

The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to…

In this article, the author describes the various changes that are experienced by young adolescents. Physically, early adolescents are growing faster than at any other time in their lives except infancy. They experience significant increases in weight, height, heart size, lung capacity, and muscular strength. Intellectually and cognitively, early…

Advanced inhibitory control skills have been found in bilingual speakers as compared to monolingual controls ( Bialystok, 1999 ). We examined whether this effect is generalized to an unstudied language group (Spanish-English bilingual) and multiple measures of executive function by administering a battery of tasks to 50 kindergarten children drawn…

Schools are a central interface between evolution and culture. They are the contexts in which children learn the evolutionarily novel abilities and knowledge needed to function as adults in modern societies. Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of how an evolved bias in children's learning and motivational systems influences their…

This study examined 4- and 6-year-old children's understanding of the causal relation between the use of a rehearsal strategy and increased recall. In Session 1, children were given two study-recall trials and, on the second trial, were asked to describe their study behavior. In Session 2, children viewed videotaped models and made judgments…

Children's cognitive and perceptual development is explained in Piagetian stage theory.

Mind-research "psychenauts" are exploring the last great frontier - the mystery of man's inner life. (Editor)

This investigation examined whether advance organizers would help learning disabled (LD) adolescents to more efficiently process information on selected academic tasks. There were three phases: First, 51 LD and 63 normally achieving (NA) subjects participated in the development of a test to measure important and unimportant information. Second,…

An examination of how new knowledge is acquired reveals that knowledge is organized in global conceptual constructs called schemata, and that the process of knowledge acquisition can be conceptualized as the articulation and restructuring of these schemata. Assuming that a schema is a generative structure with implications beyond what is…