Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual…

Working memory and recognition memory develop across adolescence, but the relationship between them is not fully understood. We investigated associations between n-back task performance and subsequent recognition memory in a community sample (8-30 yr, n = 150) using tasks from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study) to…

The present study examined adults' understanding of children's early word learning. Undergraduates, non-parents, parents, and Speech-Language Pathologists (N = 535, 74% female, 56% White) completed a survey with 11 word learning principles from the perspective of a preschooler. Questions tested key principles from early word learning research. For…

This paper investigated how production task combined with teacher feedback (in the form of recasts) affects child second language development, and the effects of task complexity on their production performance. 92 child learners of English in three intact classes were assigned to three tasks of different complexity (simple, +complex, ++complex).…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

When proportional information is pit against whole number numerical information, children often attend to the whole number information at the expense of proportional information (e.g., indicating 4/9 is greater than 3/5 because 4 > 3). In the current study, we presented younger (3- to 4-year-olds) and older (5- to 6-year-olds) children a task…

Multisensory information has been shown to facilitate learning (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000; Broadbent, White, Mareschal, & Kirkham, 2017; Jordan & Baker, 2011; Shams & Seitz, 2008). However, although research has examined the modulating effect of unisensory and multisensory distractors on multisensory processing, the extent to which…

Existing evidence suggests that children, when they first pass standard theory-of-mind tasks, still fail to understand the essential aspectuality of beliefs and other propositional attitudes: such attitudes refer to objects only under specific aspects. Oedipus, for example, believes Yocaste (his mother) is beautiful, but this does not imply that…

The belief that studying mathematics improves reasoning skills, known as the Theory of Formal Discipline (TFD), has been held since the time of Plato. Research evidence supports this idea, at least in the context of students who had chosen to study post-compulsory mathematics. Here we examined the development of reasoning skills in 16- to…

Children's acquisition of tool use abilities is an important part of development but is not yet well understood. This study compares two modes of tool-use learning, observation and individual haptic experience. Two- and 3-year-olds had haptic experience with tools, observed tool use by others, had both haptic and observational experience, or no…

Research on cognitive load theory (CLT) has not yet provided facet-specific measures of cognitive load. The lack of valid methods to measure intrinsic, extraneous and germane cognitive load makes it difficult to empirically test theoretical explanations of effects caused by manipulations of instructional designs. This situation also imposes…

This study puts the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2005) to the test with respect to its predictions of the effects of changes in task complexity ([plus or minus] few elements) and task condition ([plus or minus] monologic) on L2 performance. 44 learners of Dutch performed both a simple and a complex oral task in either a monologic or a dialogic…

Examines the relation between attention to target and context information and target recall in an incidental learning task for children and adults. Results support a distinction between context-interactive and context-independent situations and suggest that the attentional patterns that are efficient for memory may differ with the kind of…

Assesses the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks; explores the relation between parents' perceived difficulty and children's perceived and actual competence in these two domains; and determines whether the ease or difficulty of these child rearing tasks, as perceived by parents, varies as a function of the…

To investigate developmental differences in timesharing performance, 60 boys, 20 in each of three age groups (7-, 10- and 13-year-olds), performed an auditory matching task and a tracking task alone and concurrently, the latter under two sets of instructions. Decrements produced by concurrent performance were compared for the three age groups.…