It is well established that children lie in different social contexts for various purposes from the age of 2 years. Surprisingly, little is known about whether very young children will spontaneously lie for personal gain, how self-benefiting lies emerge, and what cognitive factors affect the emergence of self-benefiting lies. To bridge this gap in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contributions of general cognitive skills (working memory, inhibition, and reasoning) and metalinguistic awareness to young children's character reading. One hundred eighty-nine Chinese children, aged from 60 to 78 months, were administered with measures of character recognition, language,…

Based on L. S. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, previous scaffolding studies have examined some factors associated with adjustment of parental support during collaborative problem solving. However, a factor that remains unexplored in the literature is the potential relationship between parental empathy and parental support in collaborative problem…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility and validity of a modified version of Buschke's missing scan methodology, the Missing Scan Task (MST), to assess working memory capacity (WMC) and cognitive control processes in preschool children 3-6?years in age. Forty typically developing monolingual English-speaking children between…

Previous research indicates that children hold negative beliefs about peers with foreign accents, physical disabilities, and people who are obese. The current study examined skills associated with individual differences in children's social judgements about these typically stereotyped groups. Theory of mind, memory, and cognitive inhibition were…

More than a century ago, Galton and Spearman suggested that there was a functional relationship between sensory discrimination ability and intelligence. Studies have since been able to confirm a close relationship between general discrimination ability (GDA) and IQ. The aim of the present study was to assess whether this strong relationship…

The importance of warm and democratic parenting styles for optimal social, emotional and cognitive outcomes in children over the age of five is well established. However, there is a dearth of literature exploring variations in parenting styles during infancy, despite many popular parenting books aimed at this period. The primary aim of this study…

Evaluative categories include items that share the same value-laden assessment. Given that these categories have not been examined extensively within the child concepts literature, the present research explored evaluative categorization and induction within the domain of food as a test case. Specifically, two studies examined the categories of…

A child who had had surgery at 5 months of age, and who had been treated at the time for post-traumatic symptoms (reported in a previous paper by the author), was interviewed 2 years later and almost 3 years later to test for possible verbal recall of his hospitalization. He appeared to have some memories of the experience at 29 months of age, and…

In a sample of 92 children aged 6-13 years this study investigates the normal developmental change in the relation between executive functioning (EF) and the core behavioural symptoms associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (hyperactivity/impulsivity and inattention) as well as symptoms often co-occurring with childhood…