Working memory (WM) improves dramatically during childhood but what drives this improvement is not well understood. One influential account thus far has proposed a simple increase in storage capacity. However, recent findings have shown that multiple factors, such as differences in the ability to use attention to enhance the maintenance of…

The Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, 4th ed. includes two measures of working memory normed on children 2;6-7;7. The present analyses of the typically developing children (N = 1,591, 812 female, 779 male, with an ethnic distribution approximating the United States) provide new, theoretically important information about these…

The emerging field of robotics education (RE) is a new and rapidly growing subject area worldwide. It may provide a playful and novel learning environment for children to engage with all aspects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. The purpose of this research is to examine how robotics learning activities may…

Executive functions (EF) are domain-general cognitive skills that predict foundational academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, less is known about the relation between EFs and science achievement. The nature of this relation might be explained by the theory of mutualism, which states that development is the result of complex and…

Executive functions (EF), including working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, vary as a function of socioeconomic status (SES), with children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds having poorer performance than their higher SES peers. Using observational methods, we investigated cognitive stimulation in the home as a mechanism…

Parent-grandparent coparenting is a common phenomenon in mainland China; however, little is known about its relationship with children's cognitive development. This study investigates the links between parent-grandparent coparenting and young children's executive function (EF) and examines the potential mediating role of maternal parenting between…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

The aim of the current study was two-fold. First, it evaluated the influence of bilingualism on syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Second, it explored the relationship between syntactic abilities and verbal memory of children with HFA and typical language development (TLD). Eighty-six monolingual…

The study assessed the relationship among the factors of inhibition control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility in relation to cognitive development of children. A total of 30 children (17 male and 13 female) age group 6-7 years old (Mean=6.5; SD = 0.34) participated in the study. In this study, the authors have used Stroop Task, Saccadic…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Working memory is the mental ability to temporarily store and manipulate information. Its functioning is distinct from the vast storage capacity of long-term memory and is crucial for optimal learning and development. There is considerable research on several theoretical aspects of working memory. Far less research has explored the application of…

According to some views of cognitive growth, the development of working memory capacity can account for increases in the complexity of cognition. It has been difficult to ascertain, though, that there actually is developmental growth in capacity that cannot be attributed to other developing factors. Here we assess the role of item familiarity. We…

Because math knowledge begins to develop at a young age to varying degrees, it is important to identify foundational cognitive and academic skills that might contribute to its development. The current study focused on two important, but often overlooked skills that recent evidence suggests are important contributors to early math development:…

Substantial evidence has established that individual differences in executive function (EF) in early childhood are uniquely predictive of children's academic readiness at school entry. The current study tested whether growth trajectories of EF across the early childhood period could be used to identify a subset of children who were at pronounced…

What cognitive processes influence how well we maintain information in visual short-term memory (VSTM)? We used a developmentally informed design to delve into the interplay of top-down spatial biases with the nature of the internal memory codes, motivated by documented changes for both factors over childhood. Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and…