Child development最新文献

The home numeracy environment is suggested to influence children's numerical development, but causal evidence for this assertion remains limited. Addressing this gap, we randomly assigned 117 predominantly White 4–5-year-olds (M = 4.68 years, SD = 0.2, 47% girls) attending preschool in Flanders (Belgium) to either an experimental (numeracy) or an active control (language) condition. The 6-week intervention (pretest-March 2023; posttest-May 2023) consisted of an ecologically valid implementation, with parents integrating flexible activities into their routines. Pre- and post-intervention assessments measured children's numerical skills. Medium effects were observed on transcoding and ordering skills, providing causal evidence for the impact of the home numeracy environment on children's numeracy. This study highlights the potential of ecologically valid interventions to support early numeracy in daily life.

Cognitive development is associated with how predictable caregivers are, but the mechanisms driving this are unclear. One possibility is caregiver predictability initially shapes how infants gather information for learning. Here, caregiver-infant dyads (N = 222, 2-6-months-old, all female caregivers; data collected 2022–2023) in South Africa and Malawi engaged in naturalistic play before their interactions were hand-annotated to measure caregiver predictability and infant gaze. In both countries, temporal variation in caregiver predictability shaped infant looking dynamics—infants attended to specific sensory signals (η² = 0.04) and specific timepoints (η² = 0.10) that were useful for them based on their caregiver's typical behavior. These findings provide a framework by which the predictability of caregiver behavior may shape fundamental, early optimization of visual attention for learning in infancy and later cognitive development.

This study distinguished the cognitive and affective components of advanced theory of mind (AToM) and their distinct contributions to narrative reading comprehension (NRC) across different grades. In a longitudinal study (Time 1: April 2023) involving 344 Chinese children from Grades 2–5 (174 girls, M_age = 9.60 years), results indicated that both AToM types develop in middle grades (2nd and 3rd) and stabilize by upper grades (4th and 5th), with affective AToM consistently higher than cognitive AToM. After accounting for 10 confounding variables, cognitive AToM was crucial in middle grades, enhancing NRC through metacognitive awareness of reading, while affective AToM became more prominent in upper grades, facilitating NRC through reading transportation. These findings provide insights for age-appropriate educational interventions to foster literary appreciation.

This study examined whether a mediational cascade involving children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity to a series of cognitive and socio-evaluative stressors, their callous-unemotional (CU) traits, and psychological adjustment was moderated by their cardiac pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity. Using a multi-method, multi-informant design, 238 mothers and their preschool children (M_age = 4.38, 52% female; 68% White; 18% Black; 14% Multiracial or another race; and 16% Latinx) participated in three annual timepoints from 2018 to 2022. Findings indicated that children's CU traits at Wave 2 mediated the association between dampened RSA reactivity at Wave 1 and their Wave 3 externalizing and social difficulties. Consistent with hypoarousal models of CU traits, these pathways were stronger for children with dampened PEP reactivity to the stressors.

Acquiring robust semantic representations of numbers is crucial for math achievement. However, the learning stage where magnitude becomes automatically elicited by number symbols (i.e., digits from 1 to 9) remains unknown due to the difficulty to measure automatic semantic processing. We used a frequency-tagging EEG paradigm targeting automatic magnitude processing in children (N = 33, 5–10-year-old, predominantly of White or Mixed ethnicity). A stream of digits (1–9) was presented at 10 Hz with small digits as standards, and large digits as deviants at 1.25 Hz (and the reverse). Frequency-tagged responses to the deviants show that magnitude is a salient semantic feature associated with digits in long-term memory. Automatic access to magnitude can be measured with EEG in children at the end of preschool.

When determining what others know, we intuitively consider not only whether they succeed but also their probability of success in the absence of knowledge (e.g., random guessing). Across three experiments (n = 240 North American 4–6-year-olds, data collected between 2020–2023) we find that 4-year-olds understand that tasks with a lower probability of chance success are harder. However, it is not until age 6 that children use this understanding to gauge (Experiment 1) and infer (Experiments 2–3) what others know. These results suggest that, although basic probabilistic reasoning and representations of knowledge are well in place by age 4, children do not integrate the two to make mental-state inferences until much later, pointing to an area of important developmental change in Theory of Mind.