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…

Understanding (a) how responses become prepotent provides insights into when inhibition is needed in everyday life. Understanding (b) how response prepotency is overcome provides insights for helping children develop strategies for overcoming such tendencies. Concerning (a), on tasks such as the day-night Stroop-like task, is the difficulty with…

This study investigated peripheral vision (at least 30[degrees] eccentric to fixation) development in profoundly deaf children without cochlear implantation, and compared this to age-matched hearing controls as well as to deaf and hearing adult data. Deaf and hearing children between the ages of 5 and 15 years were assessed using a new,…

Morton and Harper (2007 ) argue that research presented in support of a bilingual advantage in the development of executive control has been confounded with social class, the actual mechanism for group differences. As evidence, they report a study in which a small group of monolingual and bilingual 6- and 7-year-olds performed similarly on a Simon…

Four-year-olds were asked to assess an adult listener's knowledge of the location of a hidden sticker after the listener was provided an ambiguous or unambiguous description of the sticker location. When preschoolers possessed private knowledge about the sticker location, the location they chose indicated that they judged a description to be…

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status…