Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

Working memory training improves children's cognitive performance on untrained tasks; however, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. This was investigated in 32 typically developing children aged 10-14 years (19 girls and 13 boys) using a randomized controlled design and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (Devon, UK;…

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the…

The development of error monitoring is central to learning and academic achievement. However, few studies exist on the neural correlates of children's error monitoring, and no studies have examined its susceptibility to educational influences. Pedagogical methods differ on how they teach children to learn from errors. Here, 32 students (aged 8-12…

Purpose: Phonological skills have been associated with developmental stuttering. The current study aimed to determine whether the neural processes underlying phonology, specifically for nonword rhyming, differentiated stuttering persistence and recovery. Method: Twenty-six children who stutter (CWS) and 18 children who do not stutter, aged 5…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

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…

When asked to search for a target letter while reading, the patterns with which people miss the target letter reveal information about the process of reading itself. Questions remain as to whether this paradigm reflects normal reading processes however. We used a novel continuous-performance neuroimaging paradigm to address this question. In…

Developmental differences in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and superior parietal cortex (SPC) activation are associated with differences in how children, adolescents, and adults learn from performance feedback in rule-learning tasks (Crone, Zanolie, Leijenhorst, Westenberg, & Rombouts, 2008). Both…

Socioeconomic status is an important predictor of cognitive development and academic achievement. Late adolescence provides a unique opportunity to study how the attainment of socioeconomic status (in the form of years of education) relates to cognitive and neural development, during a time when age-related cognitive and neural development is…

Background: Intra-individual variability reflects temporal variation within an individual's performance on a cognitive task. Children with developmental disorders, such as ADHD and ASD show increased levels of intra-individual variability. In typical development, intra-individual variability decreases sharply between the ages 6 and 20. The tight…

The integrated use of spatial and temporal information seems to support the separation of two sensory streams. The present study tested whether this facilitation depends on the encoding of sensory stimuli in externally anchored spatial coordinate systems. Fifty-nine children between 5 and 12 years as well as 12 young adults performed a crossmodal…

Despite the fact that hemispheric asymmetry of attention has been widely studied, a clear picture of this complex phenomenon is still lacking. The aim of the present study was to provide an efficient and reliable measurement of potential hemispheric asymmetries of three attentional networks, i.e. alerting, orienting and executive attention.…

Thinking about other people's thoughts recruits a specific group of brain regions, including the temporo-parietal junctions (TPJ), precuneus (PC), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). The same brain regions were recruited when children (N = 20, 5-11 years) and adults (N = 8) listened to descriptions of characters' mental states, compared to…

Bodies are important element for self-recognition. In this respect, in adults it has been recently shown a self vs other advantage when small parts of the subjects' body are visible. This advantage is lost following a right brain lesion underlying a role of the right hemisphere in self body-parts processing. In order to investigate the bodily-self…