This article considers alternatives to the established constructivist approaches to children's literature, exploring instead the potential of two relatively recent areas of inquiry, cognitive poetics and evolutionary literary criticism. The article questions the assumption, implied if not directly expressed by Peter Hollindale in "Signs of…

This study explores how primary school children develop their metacognitive knowledge and vocabulary knowledge and how both types of knowledge are dynamically correlated from 1st to 4th grade. The longitudinal sample included 426 first-grade students (M = 6.6 years, SD = 0.51; 50.2% boys, 49.7% girls) from five public primary schools in China. A…

Biological psychiatry, like many other scientific fields, is grappling with the challenge of revising its practices with an eye towards promoting diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI). One arena in which much of this work will have significant impact is in developmental science generally, and the study of adolescence specifically. Adolescence…

The current study evaluated the benefits of free-recall, cognitive load, and closed-ended questions on children's (ages 6 to 11; N = 147) true and false eyewitness disclosures. Children witnessed an experimenter find a stranger's wallet and were then asked to make a false denial, false accusation, true denial, or true accusation regarding an…

The neural bases of cognition may be greatly informed by relating temporally defined developmental changes in behavior with concurrent alterations in neural function. A robust improvement in performance in spatial learning and memory tasks occurs at 3 wk of age in rodents. We reported that the developmental increase of spontaneous alternation in a…

Panic attacks are common in adolescents and are experienced in several mental health difficulties. In adults, cognitions during panic attacks comprise mental images as well as thoughts. No qualitative research into panic attacks has been conducted with adolescents. Better understanding of the experience of panic attacks, including the presence and…

Children learn their earliest words through social "interaction," but it is unknown how much they rely on social "information." Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference.…

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a critical role in complex brain functions including decision-making, integration of emotional, and cognitive aspects in memory processing and memory consolidation. Because relatively little is known about the molecular mechanisms underlying its development, we quantified rat mPFC basal expression levels…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between curiosity and well-being in 18- to 29-year-old individuals. In a group of 378 working emerging adults, a survey battery was administered to measure cognitive and sensory curiosity, achieved emerging adulthood, and-being, as well as select theoretically relevant demographic variables…

Executive function (EF) is a key cognitive process that emerges in early childhood and facilitates children's ability to control their own behavior. Individual differences in EF skills early in life are predictive of quality-of-life outcomes 30 years later (Moffitt et al., 2011). What changes in the brain give rise to this critical cognitive…

This study examined the contribution of the constructs of orthographic processing (orthographic choice and orthographic choice in context), syntactic processing (grammaticality and sentence integrity), and verbal working memory (two reading span indicators) to written Chinese composition (narration, explanation, and argumentation) in 129…

Naturalistic goal-directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top-down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3- and 5-year-olds demonstrated good…

Although the importance of nature of science (NOS) instruction for learners as young as kindergartners is emphasised in a great number of documents and studies, very little research has been conducted in early childhood contexts. Thus, researchers are still not able to see a comprehensive picture of young children's understandings of NOS. The…

Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…

In this paper, a learning progression for geometric transformations is developed based on research that demonstrates the importance of viewing transformations as functions of the plane. The 5 levels of the progression reflect a student's evolving understanding of transformations as functions and their evolving understanding of the domain of these…