A growing body of research has found a relationship between parenting and the development of executive function in young children; however, fewer studies have examined how parenting is related specifically to the development of working memory. Using data from the Family Life Project, this study examined whether attention was a pathway through…

Working memory training improves children's cognitive performance on untrained tasks; however, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. This was investigated in 32 typically developing children aged 10-14 years (19 girls and 13 boys) using a randomized controlled design and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (Devon, UK;…

Executive functions (EF) are domain-general cognitive skills that predict foundational academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, less is known about the relation between EFs and science achievement. The nature of this relation might be explained by the theory of mutualism, which states that development is the result of complex and…

This Special Issue on linguistic and cognitive development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) arose from the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) (2017), when Jeannette Schaeffer, Stephanie Durrleman, and Inge-Marie Eigsti organized a symposium on this topic. It shows that the study of language development…

Executive functions (EF), including working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, vary as a function of socioeconomic status (SES), with children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds having poorer performance than their higher SES peers. Using observational methods, we investigated cognitive stimulation in the home as a mechanism…

Parent-grandparent coparenting is a common phenomenon in mainland China; however, little is known about its relationship with children's cognitive development. This study investigates the links between parent-grandparent coparenting and young children's executive function (EF) and examines the potential mediating role of maternal parenting between…

The proliferation of digital gadgets and increased media consumption among adolescents has raised interest and concern regarding possible effects on cognitive functioning. Research investigating this relationship has yielded mixed results. This study aims to replicate the research conducted by Baumgartner et al. concerning the relationship between…

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Extensive research has demonstrated the impact of working memory (WM) on first language (L1) reading comprehension across age groups (Peng et al., 2018), and on foreign language (FL) reading comprehension of adults and older adolescents (Linck et al., 2014). Comparatively little is known about the effect of WM on young FL readers' comprehension,…

The Electric Maze Task (EMT) is a novel planning task designed to allow flexible testing of planning abilities across a broad age range and to incorporate manipulations to test underlying planning abilities, such as working-memory and inhibitory control skills. The EMT was tested in a group of 63 typically developing 7- to 12-year-olds.…

Improvements in cognitive flexibility during the preschool years have been linked to developments in both working memory and inhibitory control, though the precise contribution of each remains unclear. In the current study, one hundred and twenty 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds completed two rule-switching tasks. In one version, children switched rules in…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between sports experience (i.e., tennis experience) and executive function in children while controlling for physical activity and physical fitness. Sixty-eight participants (6-12 years old, 34 males and 34 females) were enrolled in regular tennis lessons (mean = 2.4 years,…

Purpose: As online learning has become more prevalent, how learners interact with each other in those learning environments has become more salient. To develop effective levels of interaction, students must feel comfortable to express their ideas and views. For this reason, this paper aims to look at how individual students' levels of social…

The relationship among bodily movements, cognitive abilities, and academic achievement in children is receiving considerable attention in the research community. The embodied learning approach is based on the idea of an inseparable link between body and mind in learning, aiming for teaching methods that promote children's active engagement in the…