Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive…

Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the development of this organization during infancy. Middle-high socioeconomic status Mexican toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a…

Empathy is crucial for our social life, with evidences suggesting that executive function is the cognitive basis of empathy. However, debates about the causal relationship between executive function and empathy still exist. A two-wave and one-year longitudinal follow-up experiment is conducted to investigate this problem, mainly focusing on…

The correlation between linguistic literacy and geometric thinking was investigated in this study, which was conducted among 99 native Hebrew-speaking 2nd-graders. Current results suggest a positive correlation between the study measures. Higher linguistic literacy achievement was linked to higher geometric thinking achievement. Significant…

Purpose: Children who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are at increased risk for neurocognitive delays, which can have cascading effects on development. Associations between neurocognition and the content of parental language--specifically the use of mental state vocabulary--have been observed in typically hearing (TH) children. This study…

This 5-year longitudinal study investigated advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development in 161 German 5- to 10-year-olds (89 females, 72 males). Core aspects of AToM developed nonlinearly, with children reaching a milestone at the age of 7 years, around when they attained the conceptual insight that mental states can be recursive. In late…

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…

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…

We investigated the association between individual differences in metaphor understanding and Theory of Mind (ToM) in typically developing children. We distinguished between two types of metaphors and created a Physical and Mental Metaphors task, echoing a similar distinction for ToM. Nine-year-olds scored lower than older age-groups in ToM as well…

This study draws on four case studies of young children in order to explore the relationship between children's action schema [Athey, C. (1990). "Extending though in young children: A parent-teacher partnership." London: Paul Chapman] and their developing speech, language and communication. What emerged was a connection through…

Previous research shows that the development of response inhibition and drawing skill are linked. The current research investigated whether this association reflects a more fundamental link between response inhibition and motor control. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds (n = 100) were tested on measures of inhibition, fine motor control, and…

There is an increasingly rich body of developmental research on children's understanding of science and religion as ways of knowing. In this manuscript, I put this scholarship in conversation with applied research on science education and consider the potential implications for exposing children to instruction that addresses the relationship…

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size--they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional…

Caregivers' mentalization has gained importance in recent years, but most studies only include parental figures. Given empirical evidence showing the importance of educators in the development of preschoolers, this paper aims to assess how the mentalization and stress levels of parents and educational staff are related to attachment, ToM and…

Social working memory (WM) has distinct neural substrates from canonical cognitive WM (e.g., color). However, no study, to the best of our knowledge, has yet explored how social WM develops. The current study explored the development of social WM capacity and its relation to theory of mind (ToM). Experiment 1 had sixty-four 3- to 6-year-olds…