Developmental differences in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and superior parietal cortex (SPC) activation are associated with differences in how children, adolescents, and adults learn from performance feedback in rule-learning tasks (Crone, Zanolie, Leijenhorst, Westenberg, & Rombouts, 2008). Both…

Research Findings: The goal of this study was to develop a construct of sibling cognitive sensitivity, which describes the extent to which children take their siblings' knowledge and cognitive abilities into account when working toward a joint goal. In addition, the study compared 2 coding methodologies for measuring the construct: a thin…

Optimal cognitive development is defined in this article as the highest level of cognitive function reached in each cognitive domain given a person's biological and genetic disposition, and the highest possible maintenance of cognitive function over the adult life course. Theoretical perspectives underpinning the development of a framework…

Purpose: This preliminary investigation explored potential cognitive and linguistic sources of variance in 2- year-olds' speech-sound discrimination by using the toddler change/no-change procedure and examined whether modifications would result in a procedure that can be used consistently with younger 2-year-olds. Method: Twenty typically…

Technology now plays a very large role in the way children of all ages play. Children want access to technology, so parents and teachers must determine the best ways to present it to them. Computers are a popular form of technology for children as young as age three. With that in mind, computer games should be problem-solving oriented and…

Fixed cutoff dates regulating school entry create disadvantages for children who are young relative to their classmates. Early and late school enrollment, though, might mitigate these disadvantages. In this paper, we analyze in a first step which factors determine school entry, if entrance screenings allow for early and late enrollment. Second, we…

We investigated oculomotor anticipations in 4-month-old infants as they viewed center-occluded object trajectories. In two experiments, we examined performance in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) dynamic occlusion displays and in an additional 3D condition with a smiley face as the moving target stimulus. Rates of anticipatory eye…

Too often, in discussing the teaching of English, language teachers behave as if language were the most important factor in the classroom. The author thinks this is seldom the case. Language teachers need to see English as essentially an educative subject, linked to the cognitive development of learners, rather than as something isolated from the…

In this article, we present evidence that disorders of attention are present in wide range of psychological disorders, and that the appropriate assessment and treatment of these attention difficulties can be an important adjunct to traditional therapeutic approaches. We review approaches to attention training in some detail and discuss how…

Gender differences among contributing student leadership development resources were examined within the context of theory-based perspectives of leadership-related attributes. The findings suggest that students' increased engagement with institutional constituencies cultivates an environment conducive to students' cognitive development toward…

In this paper we discuss some literature relating to episodic memory, future episodic thinking and mental time travel in humans and non-human animals. We discuss the concept of mental time travel and argue that the concept relies on subjective phenomena such as consciousness and on this basis is not useful when studying episodic memory and future…

Numerous studies have established that visual working memory has a limited capacity that increases during childhood. However, debate continues over the source of capacity limits and its developmental increase. Simmering (2008) adapted a computational model of spatial cognitive development, the Dynamic Field Theory, to explain not only the source…

We present an algorithmic model for the development of children's intuitive theories within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, where theories are described as sets of logical laws generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar. We contrast our approach with connectionist and other emergentist approaches to modeling cognitive development. While…

Much of the research on object individuation in infancy has used a task in which two different objects emerge in alternation from behind a large screen, which is then removed to reveal either one or two objects. In their seminal work, Xu and Carey (1996) found that it is typically not until the end of the first year that infants detect a violation…

How do infants select and use information that is relevant to the task at hand? Infants treat events that involve different spatial relations as distinct, and their selection and use of object information depends on the type of event they encounter. For example, 4.5-month-olds consider information about object height in occlusion events, but…