Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and…

To chart the developmental path of children's attribution of pride to others, we presented children (4 years 0 month to 11 years 11 months of age, N = 108) with video clips of head-and-face, body posture, and multi-cue (both head-and-face and body posture simultaneously) expressions that adults consider to convey pride. Across age groups, 4- and…

We tested children in Grades 1 to 5, as well as college students, on a number line estimation task and examined latencies and errors to explore the cognitive processes involved in estimation. The developmental trends in estimation were more consistent with the hypothesized shift from logarithmic to linear representation than with an account based…

Converging developmental decision-making studies have demonstrated that until late adolescence, individuals prefer options for which the risk of a loss is low regardless of the final outcome. Recent works have shown a similar inability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome among adults. The current study aimed to identify developmental…

This study examined the development of executive function (EF) in a typically developing sample from middle childhood to adolescence using a range of tasks varying in affective significance. A total of 102 participants between 8 and 15 years of age completed the Iowa Gambling Task, the Color Word Stroop, a Delay Discounting task, and a Digit Span…

Working memory (WM) processing in children has been studied with different approaches, focusing on either the organizational structure of WM processing during development (factor analytic) or the influence of different task conditions on WM processing (experimental). The current study combined both approaches, aiming to distinguish verbal and…

The second year of life is marked by pronounced changes in the length of time over which events are remembered. We tested whether the age-related differences are related to differences in memory for the specific features of events. In our study, 16- and 20-month-olds were tested for immediate and long-term recall of individual actions and temporal…

Preschoolers who explore objects haptically often fail to recognize those objects in subsequent visual tests. This suggests that children may represent qualitatively different information in vision and haptics and/or that children's haptic perception may be poor. In this study, 72 children (2 1/2-5 years of age) and 20 adults explored unfamiliar…

Few studies have explored the development of response selection processes in children in the case of object manipulation. In the current research, we studied the "end-state comfort effect," the tendency to ensure a comfortable position at the end rather than at the beginning of simple object manipulation tasks. We used two versions of the…

Past research suggests that children begin to phonologically rehearse at around 7 years of age. Less is known regarding the development of refreshment, an attention-based maintenance mechanism. Therefore, the use of these two maintenance methods by 6- and 8-year-olds was assessed using memory span tasks that varied in their opportunities for…

The influence of contextual similarity on children's recognition memory performance was examined using a retroactive interference paradigm. In the study, 9- and 12-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of two contextual conditions. In both conditions, target and interfering information were presented in distinctive contexts by using different…

We explored whether a rising trend to blindly "overcopy" a model's causally irrelevant actions between 3 and 5 years of age, found in previous studies, predicts a more circumspect disposition in much younger children. Children between 23 and 30 months of age observed a model use a tool to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or opaque…

Eye gaze plays a pivotal role during communication. When interacting deceptively, it is commonly believed that the deceiver will break eye contact and look downward. We examined whether children's gaze behavior when lying is consistent with this belief. In our study, 7- to 15-year-olds and adults answered questions truthfully ("Truth" questions)…

Two experiments examined developmental patterns in children's conditional reasoning with everyday causal conditionals. In Experiment 1, a group of pre-, early, young, and late adolescents generated counterexamples for a set of conditionals to validate developmental claims about the counterexample retrieval capacity. In Experiment 2, participants…

This study investigated how infants gather information about their environment through looking and how that changes with increases in motor skills. In Experiment 1, 9.5- and 14-month-olds participated in a 10-min free play session with both a stranger and ambiguous toys present. There was a significant developmental progression from passive to…