Three experiments examined children's and adults' abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a 3-variable mechanical…

The present study prospectively evaluated cumulative early life perceived stress in relation to differential change in memory and perceptual speed from middle childhood to early adulthood. We aimed to identify periods of cognitive development susceptible to the effects of perceived stress among both adopted and nonadopted individuals. The sample…

The present study examined whether age moderates the relationship between cognitive factors (theory of mind and attribution of intentions) and relational aggression. Participants (N = 426; 216 boys) between 6 and 9 years of age were asked to complete theory of mind tasks and answer an attribution of intentions questionnaire. Teachers evaluated…

The present study explored the temporal allocation of attention in groups of 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults performing a rapid serial visual presentation task. In a dual-condition task, participants had to detect a briefly presented target (T2) after identifying an initial target (T1) embedded in a random series of…

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual…

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…

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…

This study examines the relationships between students' academic levels, the use of motivational regulation strategies, and cognitive learning strategies. A total of 141 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in online distance courses participated in the study. The findings show that students use different motivational regulation strategies…

The present study examines 5- to 8-year-old children's relation reasoning in solving matrix completion tasks. This study incorporates a componential analysis, an eye-tracking method, and a microgenetic approach, which together allow an investigation of the cognitive processing strategies involved in the development and learning of children's…

Attention induces synchronicity in neuronal firing for the encoding of a given stimulus at the exclusion of others. Recently, we reported decreased variability in scalp-recorded cortical evoked potentials to attended compared with ignored speech in adults. Here we aimed to determine the developmental time course for this neural index of auditory…

Two experiments investigated 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-grade children's and adults' judgments related to the controllability of cognitive activities, including object recognition, inferential reasoning, counting, and pretending. In Experiment 1, fifth-grade children and adults rated transitive inference and interpretation of ambiguous pictures as more…

Despite the importance of handwriting for school readiness and early academic progress, prior research on the development of handwriting has focused primarily on the product rather than the process by which young children write letters. In contrast, in the present work, early handwriting is viewed as involving a suite of perceptual, motor, and…

Two independent studies were conducted to examine the relationship of problem solving styles to parenting styles. Both studies used VIEW: An Assessment of Problem Solving Style and the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ). Study 1 included 173 adults recruited using Mechanical Turk and Study 2 included 131 adults recruited using Qualtrics. Data…

People are often exposed to more information than they can actually remember. Despite this frequent form of information overload, little is known about how much information people choose to remember. Using a novel "stop" paradigm, the current research examined whether and how people choose to stop receiving new--possibly…

The aim of the present research is to assess the developmental pattern of the metacognitive knowledge of attention in Italian primary school students. Data were collected from 95 pupils divided into two age groups: the first (6-8 years) and second primary school cycles (8-10 years). The children were asked to perform two specific thematic drawings…