Memory for the time associated with past events is critical for our understanding of episodic memory and its development. Relatively little is known about the factors that influence temporal memory development. One such factor examined in the literature is semantic knowledge for time (conventional time knowledge; CTK). Other possible factors…

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current…

The development of children's future-oriented cognition has become a popular research topic in the past two decades. Much of this research focuses on the preschool and middle childhood years, but very little is known about the future-oriented cognitive abilities of toddlers and young preschoolers. The present study investigated the emergence of…

Children's ability to save emerges during the preschool years, but little is known about the different forms saving takes (and whether these relate) and the mechanisms driving its development. Because research with adults suggests that different aspects of future orientation increase adults' propensity to save, we explored whether, in a sample of…

Item recognition and temporal order memory follow different developmental trajectories during middle childhood, with item recognition performance stabilizing and temporal order memory performance continuing to improve. We investigated the potential unique role of individual executive functions on item recognition and temporal order memory during…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Research on mother-child reminiscing about previously experienced events carried out over the last 20 years indicates clear linkages between mothers' use of an elaborative conversational style and children's developing skills for remembering. The articles that comprise this special issue utilize both longitudinal designs and experimental methods,…

An experimental design was utilized to examine the effects of elaborative talk during and/or after an event on children's event memory reports. Sixty preschoolers were assigned randomly to one of four conditions that varied according to a researcher's use of high- or low- elaborative during- and/or post-event talk about a camping event. In a…

We conducted three experiments to investigate how opportunities to view objects together in time influence memory for location. Children and adults learned the locations of 20 objects marked by dots on the floor of an open, square box. During learning, participants viewed the objects either simultaneously or in isolation. At test, participants…

Developmental psychologists have been preoccupied with the shape or form of development since the early days of developmental psychology. One of their main concerns has been to specify the developmental function of the characteristics (i.e., behaviors, traits, abilities, processes, etc.) that are of interest to them. This is equivalent to saying…

All of the target articles in this issue are concerned with trajectories of development, with all focusing in one way or another on U-shaped functions. For purposes of this commentary, the author is primarily concerned with the Cashon and Cohen article. The mechanisms whereby one processes faces represent one of several perceptual/cognitive…