Early childhood aggression is a ubiquitous and developmentally normal behavior; however, different report sources (e.g., child self-report vs. teacher) often yield markedly different interpretations. The current study examined how typical demographic and cognitive factors that have been previously found to explain child behavior (e.g., SES,…

Mathematical thinking is a complex, multi-faceted process that has been described as messy and difficult but can also show growth and insights into conceptual understanding and knowing. This paper explores the application of Edward de Bono's practical thinking, in particular, the occurrence of porridge words to examine the mathematical thinking of…

Parenting is widely considered to be among the most important influences on early childhood (EC) development. But to what extent and under what circumstances can EC parenting programs improve child learning outcomes? While substantial progress has been made toward addressing these questions in recent years, there have been few attempts to…

This paper has two main goals: first, to analyze current research related with transition to identify the foci being produced and reproduced by research through a literature review and, second, to map the connections between circulating discourses to unfold the discursive network that supports them via an intensive reading. Specifically, we are…

Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

Recent findings from social attention research suggest direct engagement with others is a necessary condition for the social cognitive development of both autistic children and their typically developing peers. These findings come from studies that have used eye-tracking technology and paradigms for measuring social attention in naturalistic,…

These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32).…

Generating own examples for previously encountered new concepts is a common and highly effective learning activity, at least when the examples are of high quality. Unfortunately, however, students are not able to accurately evaluate the quality of their own examples and instructional support measures such as idea unit standards that have been…

Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children's basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children's religious…

This study aims at investigating the relationship between working memory updating and working memory capacity in preschool children. A sample of 176 preschoolers (36-74 months) was administered a working memory updating task (Magic House) along with three working memory capacity tests that specifically measure their core attentional component (M…

To determine the effects of non-pharmacological randomised controlled trials in adults with autism, a systematic review was conducted across five electronic databases. A total of 3865 abstracts were retrieved, of which 41 articles met all inclusion criteria: randomised controlled trial; non-pharmacological intervention; adults with autism; and…

In this exploratory study, we designed and validated game-based performance tasks to assess the development of representational flexibility in autistic adolescents through virtual reality (VR)-based training. Representational flexibility, a critical cognitive ability, involves attention switching, generating representations, and recognizing…

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have…

The current study is the first to examine the role of exploration in play milestones development using a multi-measure micro-analytic approach. Fifteen infants, between the ages of 8 and 17 months, were observed in their natural home environment once a month for a one--hour session; their spontaneous mouthing and fingering and their play level…

Schools are institutions responsible for teaching children new skills and knowledge, the ability to think about future targets, and, when problems become complex, how to apply explorative thinking and inborn creativity to solve them. Even so, scholars point to the fact that school curriculums do not support ways to facilitate explorative learning…