When children transition to school between the ages of 4 and 6 years, they must learn to control their attention and behaviour to be successful. Concurrently, executive function (EF) is an important skill undergoing significant development in childhood. To understand changes occurring during this period, we examined the role of parenting in the…

We apply a biopsychosocial conceptualization to attention development in the 1st year and examine the role of neurophysiological and social processes on the development of early attention processes. We tested whether maternal behavior measured during 2 mother-child interaction tasks when infants (N = 388) were 5 months predicted infant medial…

In the first year of life, the ability to search for hidden objects is an indicator of object permanence and, when multiple locations are involved, executive function (i.e. inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory). The current study was designed to examine attentional predictors of search in 5-month-old infants (as measured by the…

Research Findings: A total of 81 children participated in a longitudinal investigation of inhibitory control (IC) from 2 to 4 years of age. Child IC was measured via maternal report and laboratory measures under conditions of conflict and delay. Performance on delay IC tasks at 3 years was related to performance on these same tasks at 2 and…

Age-related differences in episodic memory judgments assessing recall of fact information and the source of this information were examined. The role of executive function (EF) in supporting early episodic memory ability was also explored. Four- and 6-year-old children were taught 10 novel facts from two different sources (experimenter or puppet),…

Moderate, yet relatively consistent, associations between cognitive performance and shyness have been reported throughout the child and adult literatures. The current study assessed longitudinal associations between cognition (i.e., executive functioning) and parent-report temperamental shyness from infancy to early childhood and used temporal…

We recorded electroencephalogram (EEG; 6-9 Hz) and heart rate (HR) from infants at 5 and 10 months of age during baseline and performance on the looking A-not-B task of infant working memory (WM). Longitudinal baseline-to-task comparisons revealed WM-related increases in EEG power (all electrodes) and EEG coherence (medial frontal-occipital…

Fifty 8-month-old infants participated in a study of the interrelations among cognition, temperament, and electrophysiology. Better performance on a working memory task (assessed using a looking version of the A-not-B task) was associated with increases in frontal-parietal EEG coherence from baseline to task, as well as elevated levels of…

A total of 81 toddlers (24-27 months of age) participated in a biobehavioral investigation of inhibitory control. Maternal report measures of inhibitory control were related to laboratory tasks assessing inhibitory abilities under conditions of conflict, delay, and compliance challenge as well as toddler verbal ability. In addition, unique…

This study of infant declarative memory concurrently examined brain-electrical activity and deferred imitation performance in 10-month-old infants. Continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) measures were collected throughout the activity-matched baseline, encoding (modeling) and retrieval (delayed test) phases of a within-subjects deferred imitation…

This study investigated age-related differences in working memory and inhibitory control (WMIC) in 3 1/2-, 4-, and 4 1/2-year-olds and how these differences were associated with differences in regulatory aspects of temperament, language comprehension, and brain electrical activity. A series of cognitive control tasks was administered to measure…