This longitudinal study investigated parents' different pretend play behaviors (substitution, animation, and role enactment) to their infants during free play and the bidirectional links with infants' vocabulary development at 14 months (Time-1: N = 34, M[subscript age] = 14.23 months) and 20 months (Time-2: N = 34, M[subscript age] = 20.33…

Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children's…

The metarepresentational aspect of early pretend play (make-believe activities where children create or participate in creating a new situation different from a real one) has been theoretically debated. In the present longitudinal study of N = 83 children, we tested for predictive relations of shared attention at 12-18 months, implicit false…

Previous studies found an impact of language familiarity on face recognition in 9- and 12-month-olds. Own race faces are better recognized when associated with native language, whereas for other race faces, it is with non-native language. The aim of this study is to investigate if language familiarity can also influence abstract pattern…

Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates…

Few studies have used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and exploratory bifactor factor analysis (EBFA) to define a baseline factor structure model checking the construct-relevant psychometric multidimensionality of student engagement. This study was conducted on a sample of 3,374 students in France, Wallonia-Brussels Federation, and Luxembourg by…

Theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute beliefs to oneself and others. The present study used a dynamic systems approach to assess how environment may affect the development of second-order theory of mind (e.g., "John knows that Mary knows that he went out yesterday"). Theory of mind is divided into two major dimensions:…

The present study examined whether age moderates the relationship between cognitive factors (theory of mind and attribution of intentions) and relational aggression. Participants (N = 426; 216 boys) between 6 and 9 years of age were asked to complete theory of mind tasks and answer an attribution of intentions questionnaire. Teachers evaluated…

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual…

School engagement involves cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that overlap conceptually. This conceptual ambiguity has led to measures that have either consisted of one general factor or separate correlated factors. However, neither approach can sufficiently account for both the uniqueness and the overlap of the subcomponents. The…

This study aims to examine the developmental changes in young children's perception. A matching completion task consisting of three geometric figures and one bird-like figure were completed by children 3-5 years of age ("N" = 99). The rotation effect, in which the correct response decreased with orientation (45°, 90° 135°, and 180°), was…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

An individual's neurodevelopmental and cognitive sequelae to negative early experiences may, in part, be explained by genetic susceptibility. We examined whether extreme differences in the early caregiving environment, defined as exposure to severe psychosocial deprivation associated with institutional care compared to normative rearing,…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…

A series of studies on newborns' abilities for recognizing speaking faces has been performed in order to identify the fundamental cues of social cognition. We used audiovisual dynamic faces rather than photographs or patterns of faces. Direct eye gaze and speech addressed to newborns, in interactive situations, appear to be two good candidates for…