Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not…

The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others' accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection…

Although food selectivity and so-called "picky" eating are well documented in autism spectrum disorder, emotion-linked eating has rarely been investigated. This study examined emotion-linked over- and under-eating based on parent ratings of these behaviors in 4- to 17-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (n = 190) as compared…

Experimentally manipulating Approximate Number System (ANS) precision has been found to influence children's subsequent symbolic math performance. Here in three experiments (N = 160; 81 girls; 3-5 year old) we replicated this effect and examined its duration and developmental trajectory. We found that modulation of 5-year-olds' ANS precision…

The advent of technology has overshadowed children's leisure time and deprived them of the opportunity for physical activity. The main target of the current study is to discuss about the methodology of individualized diagnostics of motor activity peculiarities among children during the preschool period. The aspect of physical activity development…

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to investigate the role of a child's behavioral inhibition in mediating the relationship between parental anxiety and childhood anxiety in the Malaysian context. Participants were 92 parents (father = 23, mother = 69) of young children aged four to six years old. They completed three measures which…

Developmental programming of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is theorized as a mechanism through which early life experiences are linked to later health outcomes. Despite the importance of understanding early stress responses, reliably eliciting stress responses in young children can be challenging. The current study measured salivary…

This study examined the effectiveness of a precorrection intervention on teacher and student behavior. Children and teachers were recruited from an early childhood center in a Midwestern city to participate in this study focused on explicitly teaching behavioral expectations. Using a multiple probe design across three children, the impact of…

Selective attention is the ability to focus on goal-relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This work examined the development of selective attention to natural scenes and objects with a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Children (N = 69, ages 4-6 years) and adults (N = 80) were asked to attend to either objects…

We estimated the effects of information avoidance and information seeking among parents of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on age of diagnosis. An online survey was completed by 1,815 parents of children with ASD. Children of parents who self-reported that they had preferred "not to know," reported diagnoses around…

Four experiments examined Canadian 2- to 3-year-old children's (N = 224; 104 girls, 120 boys) thoughts about shared preferences. Children saw sets of items, and identified theirs and another person's preferences. Children expected that food preferences would be more likely to be shared than color preferences, regardless of whether the items were…

Despite calls for an increase in diversity and equity in early childhood classrooms, preschool teachers sometimes struggle to effectively address race in their classrooms, leaving young children to try to make sense of it themselves. Therefore, in this qualitative study, researchers examined how race issues were manifested in the play of young…

This article explores the potential of the idea of 'research-creation' when working with children making films in the context of a project that explored children's experience of school. The proposition of the article is that rather than see children's work as something to be discussed or extracted from, if it is seen as 'the work' it is…

Museums and galleries have long welcomed, and long valued, visiting family groups, and many offer 'family workshops'. In practice, most workshops are primarily directed at children, and accompanying adults are left to observe. However, we suggest that in actively observing and also pitching in, adults too are engaged in learning. Using the…

Although it is well-documented that families of children with autism in developed nations report hardships, few researchers have focused on families who live in less-developed, low-resource settings. Using five focus groups with 30 parents of children with autism in Mongolia, a low-resource setting, the purpose of this study was to provide…