Child development最新文献

Challenging behaviors are common in rare neurogenetic conditions and significantly impact family life. Families were especially vulnerable during COVID-19, yet little is known about behavior trajectories considering pre-pandemic risks. The Purdue Early Phenotype Study has followed children with and without neurogenetic conditions since 2017, including during the pandemic. Analyses examined patterns and predictors of challenging behaviors among 228 children (Williams = 52; Angelman = 64; Prader-Willi = 29; fragile X = 23; controls = 60), ages 1 month-10 years (57% male, predominantly White), focusing on how prepandemic features predicted later trajectories. Across classes, challenging behaviors increased. Latent class analysis showed that higher-risk family profiles predicted steeper increases in internalizing behaviors. Findings suggest COVID-19 layered complex additional effects onto dynamic early behavioral trajectories in families of children with rare neurogenetic conditions.

This study developed a block-building training paradigm to examine whether visuospatial experience in simulating another person's frame of reference can enhance young children's understanding of emotions. Conducted between 2020 and 2022, the study involved 106 children aged 4.5 years from Hong Kong (Mage = 55.30 months; 52% girls; all Hong Kong Chinese). Children in the intervention group outperformed those in the control group in both visuospatial perspective-taking and emotion understanding at posttest. Notably, mediation analyses revealed that the block-building training indirectly improved children's emotion understanding by enhancing their visuospatial perspective-taking. These findings support the idea that psychological perspective-taking may be grounded in embodied simulation processes involved in visuospatial perspective-taking.

Possible mechanisms behind newborn face preferences are debated, including innate templates, top-heavy bias, focus on eyes, and rapid learning explanations. This study examined whether White 2- to 5-day-olds (recruited in France between 2012 and 2015) prefer adult over neonate faces with same-race (White) and other-race (Chinese) faces. Newborns viewed adult and neonate faces of the same race (n = 21, 5 females) and other race (n = 22, 10 females). To assess the role of image features, same-race faces were presented upside down (n = 23, 10 females). Newborns preferred adult faces with upright same-race faces (Cohen's d = 0.95), but not with other-race or inverted faces, supporting an account based on familiarity rather than structural bias or feature-based attention.

An abstract understanding of communication should support reasoning about both its success and failure: why it fails, what happens as a consequence, and how to fix it. Auditory noise frequently corrupts verbal communication, but little is known about how humans come to reason about it. The current work explored American 3- to 5-year-olds' third-party reasoning (Experiment 1, N = 168, 95 female) and communicative behaviors (Experiment 2, N = 48, 23 female) in noisy environments between 2021 and 2024. Children understood that auditory noise impedes others' hearing and prevents knowledge transmission, and they modified their own communication by gesturing more when their partner could not hear. Thus, even young children understand how noise disrupts communication and can communicate effectively in its presence.

Inhibition has been suggested to contribute to symbolic and nonsymbolic quantity processing, but conclusions remain inconsistent. Using Structural Equation Modelling, the structure of inhibition and its contributions to symbolic and nonsymbolic arithmetic are explored in predominantly White, high-SES French 5- and 7-year-olds (N = 331, 169 females). Data were collected in Paris schools between January 2020 and March 2021. Results suggest a lack of support for a unitary or binary (Response Inhibition and Distractor Suppression) inhibition construct and highlight a link in both age groups between the Stop-Signal Task and symbolic arithmetic, and a link between the Flanker task and nonsymbolic arithmetic only in 7-year-olds. This study dissects the differential contributions of inhibition facets to arithmetic development in a critical time window.

Previous research finds that children are surprisingly closed to the possibility of unlikely events. Two studies with 5-to-8-year-old children (N = 240; 68% female; mixed ethnicities) and adults (N = 550; 42% female; mixed ethnicities) collected between July 2020 and December 2020, found that children are more open to the possibility of all event types in the future than in the past, and that all age groups were less likely to categorize all event types as impossible when they had the option of categorizing them as "possible, but unlikely" than when they only had the option of calling them "possible." However, many children still frequently categorized unlikely events as impossible. These findings shed light on conditions that influence children's possibility judgments while underscoring their robust tendency to conflate improbability with impossibility.

This study examined the role of empathy in prosocial behavior among Chinese autistic and neurotypical children aged 4-8 between July 2018 and August 2021. Study 1 included 79 autistic children (89% boys) and 81 neurotypical children (77% boys) in a sharing task and found empathy-inducing context increased sharing in both groups, and informant-report empathy positively predicted sharing behavior. Study 2 recruited 57 autistic (82% boys) and 50 neurotypical children (78% boys) in a pain-related empathy task combining eye-tracking and a sharing task. Autistic children showed reduced visual attention to others' pain but intact emotional arousal. Across both groups, greater visual attention to others' pain predicted more sharing. These findings indicate that enhancing empathy can promote prosocial behavior in young children.

The present study investigated the role of visual statistical learning in how developing readers learn to identify morphemes within words. A total of 121 children (55 girls, aged 6-11 years, M = 8.82, SD = 1.30) were recruited in Trieste, Italy, between January and June 2019. They were familiarized with pseudo-letter strings containing affix-like chunks, which could be identified only by their statistical properties. After passively observing the stimuli, children were more likely to attribute previously unseen strings to the familiarization lexicon if they contained a chunk, regardless of its position within the string. Results indicate that children can acquire morpho-orthographic knowledge through visual regularities from printed input. This ability was not modulated by age nor reading fluency, suggesting an early-maturing learning mechanism. The findings emphasize the importance of incorporating this fundamental, language-agnostic mechanism into morphology and reading acquisition theories.

This study investigated toddlers' sensitivity to emotional consistency and its influence on social engagement. Sixty-eight toddlers of diverse ethnic backgrounds (39 females; 338-908 days old; 79.4% White; and collected in 2024) watched videos depicting adults expressing emotions toward novel objects. The expression valence was either consistent (e.g., always positive toward Object A) or inconsistent (e.g., both positive and negative toward Object A). Eighteen- to 24-month-olds exhibited distinct looking when learning the consistent versus inconsistent informants (Cohen's d = 0.42) and showed greater sustained gaze following toward the emotionally consistent informants (Hedges' g = 0.45). Twelve- to 18-month-olds did not differentiate between conditions. These data suggest that detecting and utilizing emotional consistency as a cue for social engagement develops during the second year of life.

Identifying social biases in ourselves and others is a critical first step in addressing and, ultimately, overcoming their deleterious effects. This study (conducted from 2022 to 2023) was designed to examine how U.S. 4- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 115; 67 male, 47 female, 1 non-identified gender; majority White; majority upper-middle SES) accounted for a protagonist who repeatedly acted negatively toward one novel (targeted) group and kindly toward another novel group. Over three-quarters of participants identified the protagonist as biased against the targeted group, although many children younger than 7-years never inferred a bias. Participants who did infer a bias typically did so after observing just one or two social interactions. Implications of these findings and important future directions are discussed.