Journal of Cognition and Development最新文献

Performance on lab assessments of executive functions predicts academic achievement and other positive life outcomes. A primary goal of research on executive functions has been to design interventions that improve outcomes like academic achievement by improving executive functions. These interventions typically involve extensive practice on abstract lab-based tasks and lead to improvements on these practiced tasks. However, interventions rarely improve performance on non-practiced tasks and rarely benefit outcomes like academic achievement. Contemporary frameworks of executive function development suggest that executive functions develop and are engaged within personal, social, historical, and cultural contexts. Abstract lab-based tasks do not well-capture the real-world contexts that require executive functions and should not be expected to provide generalized benefits outside of the lab. We propose a perspective for understanding individual differences in performance on executive function assessments that focuses on contextual influences on executive functions. We extend this contextual approach to training executive function engagement, rather than training executive functions directly. First, interventions should incorporate task content that is contextually relevant to the targeted outcome. Second, interventions should encourage engaging executive functions through reinforcement and contextual relevance, which may better translate to real-world outcomes than training executive functions directly. While such individualized executive functions interventions do not address systemic factors that greatly impact outcomes like academic achievement, given the extensive resources devoted to improving executive functions, we hypothesize that interventions designed to encourage children's engagement of executive functions hold more promise for impacting real-world outcomes than interventions designed to improve executive function capacities.

The present study examined how culture and gender influence the self-construal of mothers and their four-year-olds during dyadic reminiscing. Participants were 21 Thai (11 girls, 10 boys) and 21 American (10 girls, 11 boys) mother-child dyads. Thai dyads exhibited a more interdependent self-construal, whereas American dyads exhibited a more independent self-construal, as measured by personal and group pronoun usage and discussions of behavioral expectations, thoughts and feelings, and personal attributes. Girls and boys differed in the extent to which their self-construal was defined in relation to others in their social groups, for example girls mentioned teachers and classmates more than boys. Culture and gender also interacted in influencing self-construal, with Thai girls (but not boys) mentioning family members more than American counterparts. These findings suggest that the development of children's self-construal, particularly the extent to which children are socialized to view and express themselves independently of others or interdependently with others, differs depending on culture and gender. This work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between autobiographical memory and self during the formative years. Starting as early as preschool, our social environment influences the way we remember our experiences, which in turn shapes our self-construal.

During the preschool years, children are simultaneously undergoing a reshaping of their mental number line and becoming increasingly sensitive to the social norms expressed by those around them. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old American and Israeli children were given a task in which an experimenter laid out chips with numbers (1-5), letters (A-E), or colors (Red-Blue, the first colors of the rainbow), and presented them with a specific order (initial through final) and direction (Left-to-right or Right-to-left). The experimenter either did not demonstrate the laying out of the chips (Control), emphasized the process of the left-to-right or right-to-left spatial layout (Process), or used general goal language (Generic). Children were then asked to recreate each sequence after a short delay. Children also completed a short numeracy task. The results indicate that attention to the spatial structuring of the environment was influenced by conventional framing; children exhibited better recall when the manner of layout was emphasized than when it was not. Both American and Israeli children were better able to recall numerical information relative to non-numerical information. Although children did not show an overall benefit for better recall of information related to the culture's dominant spatial direction, American children's tendency to recall numerical direction information predicted their early numeracy ability.

Research on spatial navigation is essential to understanding how mobile species adapt to their environments. Such research increasingly uses virtual environments (VEs) because, although VE has drawbacks, it allows for standardization of procedures, precision in measuring behaviors, ease in introducing variation, and cross-investigator comparability. Developmental researchers have used a wide range of VE testing methods, including desktop computers, gaming consoles, virtual reality, and phone applications. We survey the paradigms to guide researchers' choices, organizing them by their characteristics using a framework proposed by Girard (2022) in which navigation is reactive or deliberative, and may be tied to sensory input or not. This organization highlights what representations each paradigm indicates. VE tools have enriched our picture of the development of navigation, but much research remains to be done, e.g., determining retest reliability, comparing performance on different paradigms, validating performance against real-world behavior and open sharing. Reliable and valid assessments available on open-science repositories are essential for work on the development of navigation, its neural bases, and its implications for other cognitive domains.

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current study aimed to extend this literature by (a) recruiting a large sample of participants (n = 116; 53 boys; 63 girls; all U.S. residents; 88 White, 8 Hispanic or Latino, 2 Black or African American, 14 two or more races/ethnicities, 4 unknown; median family income: $74-122,000), (b) examining multiple measures of infant social cognition (intentional action understanding, responding to joint attention, initiating joint attention) at Time 1 (8-12 months), and (c) using an ecologically valid theory of mind assessment designed to capture individual differences in preschoolers' mental state understanding (the Children's Social Understanding Scale; Tahiroglu et al., 2014) at Time 2 (37-45 months). Measured variable path analysis revealed a significant longitudinal association between infants' initiating joint attention and later theory of mind: infants who engaged in more attempts to initiate joint attention with experimenters through gaze alternation or gestures went on to show better parent-reported mental state understanding as preschoolers. Notably, the paths from infants' responding to joint attention and intentional action understanding to later theory of mind did not emerge as significant. These findings bolster and clarify existing claims about how mental state reasoning is rooted in foundational social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy.