Child development最新文献

Timing of foster care placement, especially early in life, may have important implications for children's later academic functioning. Given racial disparities in placement decisions, examining associations between age at foster care entry and school outcomes by race is warranted. To address this gap, linked, longitudinal administrative data were used for a cohort of infants involved with child protective services by age one (n = 8795; 47% White, 21% Black, 16% Hispanic, 16% other race/ethnicity; 52% male). Results suggest foster care placement in the first 6 months is related to higher odds of basic reading test scores and lower odds of absenteeism, with associations stronger for Black children. These results have significant implications for the child welfare system.

This longitudinal study investigates metacognitive development in children aged four to six (N = 148; 74 girls; 106 White, 21 multiracial, 17 Black, 3 Asian, 1 Latino; collected in 2017–2019) compared to adults (N = 26, 13 women; collected in 2022). We assessed metacognitive monitoring and control using experimenter-elicited and self-generated responses in decision-making tasks. Children demonstrated reliable task monitoring by age five and performance monitoring by age six, only on self-generated measures. Children's choice patterns were driven by uncertainty until age six, when performance-optimizing patterns emerged. Cross-lagged panel analysis showed early monitoring abilities predicted later control, supporting the monitoring-drives-control theory. These findings illuminate the early metacognitive development trajectory, notably the transition from uncertainty-based to performance-oriented decision-making.

Four-month-old infants extract ordinal information in number-based and size-based visual sequences, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Here the ontogenetic origins of ordinal processing were investigated between 2018 and 2022 by testing newborns' discrimination of reversal in numerosity (Experiment 1, N = 22 White, 11 females), numerical order in the presence of redundant non-numerical quantitative cues (Experiment 2, N = 44 White, 23 females), or size-based order (Experiment 3, N = 44 White, 21 females). Newborns' post-habituation preferences revealed successful discrimination only when both numerical (items' number) and non-numerical (items' size) cues concurrently changed, and following habituation to increasing order (p = 0.017, η²_p = 0.135). These findings, along with evidence from older infants and non-human animals, suggest continuity in magnitude representation across ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels.

Music is a powerful medium to study emotion recognition. However, findings are mixed regarding the proficiency of young children to detect emotion conveyed by music. Moreover, we lack knowledge about music emotion recognition and callous-unemotional traits, which portend risk for externalizing problems. The current study examined the performance of 144 children aged 3–5 years old (47.9% female; 34.0% minoritized race/ethnicity) during a music recognition task, with clips conveying happiness, sadness, calmness, or fear. Children showed above-chance accuracy, particularly for high-arousal emotions (happiness, fear), with accuracy increasing from 3 to 5 years old. Children higher on callous-unemotional traits showed poorer emotion recognition, particularly for positively valenced music. Findings underscore the potential for music to promote emotion recognition and social competence skills across development.

Some philosophers argue that reflection is key to rational thinking. By tying reflective thinking to language, they struggle to account for minimally verbal infants and exclude nonhuman animals. This study assessed processing of undermining defeaters—a basic form of reflective thinking—in 36 two-year-old British children (13 female; M_age = 30.4 months, 98% White), 39 dogs (18 female), and 21 pigs (9 female), tested between 2022 and 2023. Informants acted on two screens: one informant reliably indicated a rewarded location; the other informant did not. Informants switched actions twice, prompting subjects to infer their reliability. Willingness to follow informants' indications did not differ between reliable and unreliable informants. However, reduced following in later trials suggests a response to uncertainty or an undermining defeater.

The goal of this study was to identify the onset and magnitude of prediction of early cognition to adult socioeconomic outcomes. Specifically, we were interested in examining which cognitive skills measured at 15, 24, 36, and 54 months predict educational attainment and salary at age 26. Data (N = 1364, 52% male) included a diverse sample (76% White; 13% Black; 6% Hispanic; 5% other; 21% had incomes no greater than 200% of the poverty level). Results indicated that a relatively large change in explained variance in educational attainment by cognitive skills occurs between 15 and 36 months, with less pronounced associations for salary at age 26. These findings have implications for developmental theory, and potentially, for identifying targets for intervention efforts.

This study investigated the associations between infant frontal EEG power (5 month), infant visual attention (10 month), and toddler executive functioning (EF; 24 month), extending previous research predominantly conducted with school-aged children. Data were collected from 410 typically developing children (51% female; 78% White, non-Hispanic) from the southeastern United States in 2003–2009. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that a one-factor model of EF in toddlerhood provided the best fit to the data, which replicates work with preschool samples. Structural equation modeling showed that infant visual attention mediated the association between infant EEG and toddler EF. These findings underscore the importance of early neural and attentional markers in shaping EF and offer novel insights that can inform early intervention.