The present study aimed to examine the effect of activity engagement, age, language proficiency, and time elapse on children's response accuracy to adult's questions. A total of 70, 3- to 6-year-old children participated in the study, engaging in a story-telling activity, a proficiency test, and two interviews. Additionally, 57 of these children…

According to the executive framework of prospective memory (PM), age-related differences in PM performance are mediated by age-related differences in executive functioning (EF). The present study further explored this framework by examining which specific components of EF are associated with PM differences between and within three age groups. A…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine the impact of cognitive load imposed by a speech production task on the speech motor performance of healthy older and younger adults. Response inhibition, selective attention, and working memory were the primary cognitive processes of interest. Method: Twelve healthy older and 12 healthy younger…

Interference control, the ability to overcome distraction from irrelevant information, undergoes considerable improvement during childhood, yet the mechanisms driving these changes remain unclear. The present study investigated the relative influence of interference at the level of the stimulus or the response. Seven-, 10-, and 20-year-olds…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

This is a longitudinal study of development in coordinated mother-infant vocal interaction from 4 to 10 months (N = 41) focusing on the development of turn-taking patterns and time spent in coordinated vocal interaction. Data analyses were carried out using multistate analysis. Both mothers and infants were found to coordinate their own…

Two experiments investigated response tendencies of preschoolers toward yes-no questions about actions. Two hundred 2- to 5-year-old children were asked questions concerning actions commonly associated with particular objects (e.g., drinking from a cup) and actions not commonly associated with particular objects (e.g., kicking a toothbrush). The…

As a large heterogeneity is observed across studies on interference control in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research may benefit from the use of a cognitive framework that models specific processes underlying reactive and proactive control of interference. Reactive control refers to the expression and suppression of responses and proactive…

The current study aimed at addressing two issues concerning children's estimation performance: (1) to investigate whether the log-to-linear framework or the proportional judgment framework provided a better explanation of children's estimation patterns, and (2) to examine the consistency of response patterns in different estimation tasks. A sample…

The neurocognitive development of moral and conventional judgments was examined. Event-related potentials were recorded while 24 adolescents (13 years) and 30 young adults (20 years) read scenarios with 1 of 3 endings: moral violations, conventional violations, or neutral acts. Participants judged whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable…

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,…

Performance of reaction time (RT) tasks was investigated in young children and adults to test the hypothesis that age-related differences in processing speed supersede a "global" mechanism and are a function of specific differences in task demands and processing requirements. The sample consisted of 54 4-year-olds, 53 5-year-olds, 59…

In coincidence-timing studies, children have been shown to respond too early to slower stimuli and too late to faster stimuli. To examine this velocity effect, children aged 6, 7.5, 9, 10.5, and adults were tested with two different velocities in a prediction-motion task which consisted of judging, after the occlusion of the final part of its…

Although there are some studies documenting structural brain changes during late adolescence, there are few showing functional brain changes over this period in humans. Of special interest would be functional changes in the medial frontal cortex that reflect response monitoring. In order to examine such age-related differences, the authors…

Two experiments were conducted to test the possibility that children are slower than adults because they are less able than adults to process the information available about subsequent events in parallel with an ongoing response. Subjects were second, third, and sixth graders and college students. (MP)