We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with…

A recent meta-analysis of 103 studies Burt ("Clinical Psychology Review," 29:163-178, 2009a) highlighted the presence of etiological distinctions between aggressive (AGG) and non-aggressive rule-breaking (RB) dimensions of antisocial behavior, such that AGG was more heritable than was RB, whereas RB was more influenced by the shared…

Children can identify owners either by seeing a person in possession of an object (a visual cue) and inferring that they are the owner or by hearing testimony about a claim of ownership (a verbal cue). A total of 391 children between 2.5 and 6 years of age were tested in three experiments assessing how children identify owners when these two cues…

Despite a growing interest in the question of tool-use development in infants, no study so far has systematically investigated how learning to use a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach object progresses with age. This was the first aim of this study, in which 60 infants, aged 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22 months, were presented with an attractive toy and a…

Studies have suggested that proper postural control is essential for the development of reaching. However, little research has examined the development of the coordination between posture and manual control throughout childhood. We investigated the coordination between posture and manual control in children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults during…

The current study addressed the role of switch detection in cognitive flexibility by testing the effect of transition cues (i.e., cues that directly signal the need to switch or maintain a given task goal) in a cued set-shifting paradigm at 5 years of age. Children performed better, especially on switch trials, when transition cues were combined…

Background: There has been an 8-fold increase in use of the term resilience within scientific and scholar literature over the last twenty years. The arena of public policy has also seen increasing use made of the concept, both with respect to child well-being and development and wider issues. Method: A focal sample of literature comprising 108…

Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a marked impairment of verbal short-term memory. The chief aim of this study was to investigate whether phonemic discrimination contributes to this deficit. The secondary aim was to investigate whether phonological representations are degraded in verbal short-term memory in people with Down syndrome…

This study examined the strategic use of questions to solve problems across early childhood. Participants (N = 54, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds) engaged in two tasks: a novel problem-solving question task that required asking questions to an informant to determine which card in an array was located in a box and a cognitive flexibility task that…

It is now widely accepted that anxiety disorders run in families, and current etiological models have proposed both genetic and environmental pathways to anxiety development. In this paper, the familial role in the development, treatment, and prevention of anxiety disorders in children is reviewed. We focus on three anxiety disorders in youth,…

This book contains a compilation of papers presented at the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2023, organized by the World Institute for Advanced Research and Science (WIARS), held in International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT) 2023, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 22 to 24 of April…

This article describes our state of knowledge regarding the development and prevention of conduct problems in early childhood, then identifies directions that would benefit future basic and applied research. Our understanding about the course and risk factors associated with early-developing conduct problems has been significantly enhanced during…

Discipline and behavior modification in schools is a culturally dependent and sensitive subject. Despite research demonstrating that corporal punishment is not effective, it remains a common practice in over 70 countries worldwide. School discipline practices vary widely around the world and even within national borders. While physical punishment…

The central question debated in current research on infant social cognition is "do infants have a theory of mind?" It is argued here that this question is understood and treated in radically different ways by different participants of the debate arguing either for (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005) or against early competence in theory of mind…

Three experiments investigated whether a negativity bias in social perception extends to preschool-aged children's memory for the details of others' social actions and experiences. After learning about individuals who committed nice or mean social actions, children in Experiment 1 were more accurate at remembering who was mean compared with who…