Over the past decade or so, developments in language comprehension research in the domain of cognitive aging have converged on support for resilience in older adults with regard to situation model updating when reading texts. Several studies have shown that even though age-related declines in language comprehension appear at the level of the…

The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children's intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children interpret and react to antisocial and prosocial interactions between puppets. An actor puppet…

Lying is an interpersonal exercise that requires the intentional creation of a false belief in another's mind. As such, children's development of lie-telling is related to their increasing understanding of others and may reflect the acquisition of basic social skills. Although certain types of lies may support social relationships, other types of…

Most of the individual difference variance in the population is found "within" families, yet studying the processes causing this variation is difficult due to confounds between genetic and nongenetic influences. Quasi-experiments can be used to test hypotheses regarding environment exposure (e.g., timing, duration) while controlling for…

Available evidence indicates that experience with one face from a specific age group improves face-processing abilities if acquired within the first 3 years of life but not in adulthood. In the current study, we tested whether the effects of early experience endure at age 6 and whether the first 3 years of life are a sensitive period for the…

Monkeys exposed to stress inoculation protocols early in life subsequently exhibit diminished neurobiological responses to moderate psychological stressors and enhanced cognitive control of behavior during juvenile development compared to non-inoculated monkeys. The present experiments extended these findings and revealed that stress inoculated…

The relationship between trait anxiety and memory functioning in young children was investigated. Two studies were conducted, using tasks tapping verbal and visual-spatial short-term memory (Study 1) and working memory (Study 2) in preschoolers. On the verbal storage tasks, there was a detrimental effect of anxiety on processing efficiency…

Theory suggests that the vision-for-perception and vision-for-action processing streams operate under very different temporal constraints (Glover, 2004; Goodale, Jackobson, & Keillor, 1994; Graham, Bradshaw, & Davis, 1998; Hu, Eagleson, & Goodale, 1999). With the present study, children and young adults were asked to estimate how far a cued target…

This study explores reciprocal relations between children's attachment representations and their cognitive ability. Previous literature has mainly focused on the prediction of cognitive abilities from attachment, rarely on the reverse prediction. This was explored in the current research. Attachment representations were assessed with the…

From a developmental point of view, examines whether children and adults confuse time and distance when they traverse a specified distance in a particular period of time. (RH)

Bengali, English, and Hindi-speaking children five to nine years old were asked to place an object in front of or behind objects with or without obvious fronts. All children responded on the basis of an inherent object cue when a fronted object was used. When a nonfronted object was used, all children treated it as a fronted object. (Author/MP)

Two experiments examined the question of whether blindfolded young children and congenitally blind children show mental practice effects for blind movements that cross the body midline. Results suggested that young children with sight can show mental practice effects in the absence of visual cues. (GLR)

Studies seven experiences of 69 infants of 12 1/2 and 17 1/2 months in dyadic play with mothers, fathers, and first-borns. Mothers and fathers were more alike than different in the amounts of play experiences they created, and infants experienced a more enriched environment with parents than with first-borns. (RJC)

Research on children's understanding of emotion has rarely focused on children from nonindustrialised countries, who may develop an understanding at different ages as compared to children reared in industrialised countries. Quechua children from an agro-pastoralist village were given an adapted version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) to…