Developmental Review最新文献

Developmental reversals are puzzling situations in which cognitive development seems to be devolving rather than evolving because reasoning and memory become more illogical and biased with age. The theoretical conundrum is to explain how underlying processes that mature in the normal way could nevertheless cause specific forms of reasoning and memory to seem to devolve. Currently, there are several competing explanations, which can be divided into two broad categories: (a) an explanation that actually predicted several developmental reversals before they were identified empirically and (b) several other explanations that attempt to account for reversals after the fact. Concerning a, fuzzy-trace theory predicted developmental reversals for certain reasoning illusions (e.g., decision framing, conjunction fallacies) and memory illusions (e.g., false memory paradigms) that had been extensively studied in adults. The key idea was that illusions in both domains derive from an ability that develops slowly, the tendency to rely on semantic gist. This explanation has stimulated a substantial research literature, which includes critical tests of its predictions. Concerning b, the alternative explanations can be grouped into major accounts and minor accounts. The major alternatives (the developmental deficit and associative network hypotheses) have generated substantial research, but neither explains the full range of developmental reversals. The minor alternatives (the working-memory capacity, item and relational encoding, recollection and familiarity, and perceptual and conceptual style hypotheses) have generated only limited research, and they also do not explain the full range of developmental reversals.

Despite a need for developmental and clinical research to understand how parents regulate their emotions in the context of parent–child interaction, empirical studies of parental emotion regulation (ER) have predominantly relied on general models and measures of adult ER. To address this gap, the present systematic review aimed to identify studies that examined parental ER in the context of parenting, and to evaluate how ER was defined and operationalized, how specific measurement contexts were established, what types of methods were involved, and the state of evidence on their reliability and validity. A systematic search in five databases yielded 91 studies that adopted assessments capturing different facets and processes of parental ER, highlighting the importance of conceptual clarity in integrating empirical findings and developing new research. Results also suggested that most studies relied on a single method or source to assess parental ER, and further evidence is needed to support the reliability and validity of many measures. Compared to general measures of adult ER, the assessments identified in this review were situated within the recollection of past parenting experiences and real-time actual or hypothetical parenting situations, allowing researchers to capture parenting demands and accommodate developmental characteristics in parent–child relationships. This review presents a toolbox for researchers interested in examining parental ER as context-specific processes and provides recommendations to move the field in a more conceptually sound and methodologically rigorous direction.

The ongoing debate regarding the effects of bilingualism on executive functions warrants a deeper investigation into sample characteristics, and the likelihood of performance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals despite the variability in samples. The present paper provides an updated quantitative analysis of studies comparing bilingual and monolingual children on executive function tasks. We report a Bayesian analysis of 147 studies that provides evidence that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tests of executive functions (e.g., attention, inhibition, working memory, shifting) far more often than chance, with a Bayes Factor classified as “extreme” evidence for the alternative (BF₁₀ = 4.08 × 10⁸). This effect is even larger than previously reported with younger adults. These effects are independent of task, publication bias, publication year, and sample size. Furthermore, we uncovered a great deal of heterogeneity and missingness of bilingual sample characteristics across studies. Our findings highlight the need to measure and report bilingualism more consistently across studies which will allow future researchers to identify the specific characteristics and circumstances that predict changes in executive functions.

The first gestures that children produce intentionally to communicate with others, make sense of the world around them, and control their behavior are ostensive gestures of showing and giving; these are also the first gestures that parents and teachers use to communicate with children and to regulate their behavior in their first months of life. Ostensive gestures are proximal gestures in which the child’s hand is occupied by an object. In this sense, objects have a role in shaping children’s first communicative acts: They are the first referents children communicate about and the first means they use to share references with others.

Despite their relevance to communicative development, a literature review highlights that there have been few studies investigating ostensive gestures in the first three years of life, while the study of distal gestures, especially pointing gestures, has prevailed. Some authors relate the relative absence of ostensive gestures in the literature to methodological issues that hinder their identification. Others question their nature as “true gestures” because they involve children’s contact with objects and therefore there can be doubt about their underlying intentionality.

Increasing evidence has shown that ostensive gestures fulfill early communicative and self-regulatory functions from the end of the first year of life. These functions are very similar to the ones that are later observed in more complex gestures, such as pointing and symbolic gestures. This similarity provides a clear idea of progression in gesture development.

Based on these ideas, this article has two main purposes: to describe ostensive gestures and reaffirm their important part in gesture development, and to explore the hypothesis that ostensive gestures not only precede pointing in development, but that they are one of pointing’s precursors, providing clues to the understanding of intentional communication’s origin.

There is a long-standing debate on the goals that underlie adolescent socially coercive behaviors, such as bullying, relational aggression, and instrumental aggression. Knowledge about these goals is critical for the development of effective interventions. Bridging evolutionary and social-cognitive perspectives, we propose and substantiate a Social Goals and Gains Model of Adolescent Bullying and Aggression. The model holds that adolescents who hold agentic goals (i.e., getting ahead of others), rather than communal goals (i.e., getting along with others), engage in more bullying and aggression. Engaging in bullying and aggression, in turn, may lead adolescents to gain popularity but lose likeability. To substantiate this model, we meta-analyzed data of 164,143 adolescents (age range: 8–20 years), from 148 independent samples, with Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling (MASEM). Our results both support and refine our model. As hypothesized, adolescents’ agentic goals were associated with higher levels of bullying and aggression. Bullying and aggression, in turn, were associated with higher popularity but lower likeability. However, there was no significant association between adolescents’ communal goals and bullying or aggression. These findings suggest that socially coercive behaviors, such as bullying and aggression, can be fueled by agentic goals and potentially lead to gains in popularity but losses in likeability. This suggests that intervention programs could reduce bullying and aggression by changing the means through which adolescents pursue agentic goals.

Predominant psychological theories of number acquisition posit that children acquire natural number concepts as they acquire the successor principle, or the knowledge that every natural number is succeeded by another natural number that is exactly-one more than it. However, exactly how children acquire the successor principle remains largely unexplained. Recently developed ideas within this family of theories posit that an abstract recursive successor function is acquired from the recursive structure of number words; however, the types of recursion underlying the successor function and number words are distinctively different (one is a self-referential function and the other is a self-embedded structure), making it difficult to theorize how one type triggers the acquisition of another. Moreover, our analysis of the literature questions if the knowledge about the successor principle is even empirically measurable. Here, we argue that number acquisition is a process of understanding a generative rule that governs the system of natural numbers and point out that the successor principle is not the only generative rule that governs the natural number system. We propose an alternative hypothesis that generative number concepts emerge from children's realization about how the combinatorial rules of numerals allow arithmetic (specifically additive and multiplicative) representations of quantity. Importantly, under addition and multiplication—which are historically rooted in concatenation and grouping of physical objects—natural numbers are mathematically closed. As a corollary, the system of infinitely generative natural numbers is conceptualized. This new theoretical framework allows the construction of novel empirical questions and testable hypotheses based on the formalized rules of numerical syntax and numeration systems, and therefore opens a new avenue for studying later stages of children's acquisition of number concepts.

The aim of the current systematic review is (1) to examine theoretical frameworks and mechanisms explaining the association between parental and teacher behaviors and child executive function (EF) development, and (2) to compare and combine empirical findings for the relationship between parental and teacher behaviors and child EF development in early and middle childhood. Results revealed that theoretical frameworks have been established more strongly in the parent literature and parental behaviors have been more extensively studied with more diverse terms compared to studies in teacher literature. Overall, patterns of findings suggest that positive (e.g., emotional support) and cognitive parental/teacher behaviors (e.g., cognitive stimulation) were positively linked to child EF performance while negative behaviors (e.g., intrusiveness) were adversely related. Considering the similar roles of parents and teachers in child EF development, insights from parent literature could enable a better understanding of the impact of teacher behaviors on child EF (and vice versa), and opens new venues for future teacher research. Moreover, these findings suggest that, in addition to genetic transmission, social factors such as parent/teacher-child interactions play a significant role in EF development. Future research should investigate the joint influence of parent and teacher behaviors on child EF.

Around the world, children play. Does play support development? If so, how? One popular idea is that play fosters the development of higher-order cognitive abilities, such as executive functions. A contrasting view is that play fosters the development of cultural knowledge and skills rather than general capacities. We describe a third proposal: that play helps children acquire culture-specific executive function skills. We articulate three ideas of how this might work, synthesizing diverse literatures. We also discuss other activities children voluntarily engage in that overlap with play and may similarly help them acquire culture-specific executive function skills. We end by considering implications of these ideas and questions for future research. We suggest that play and related activities are most likely to support the development of culture-specific executive function skills if they are informed by cultural knowledge, values and practices.

Children, much like adults, rely heavily on information from other people in the domains of word learning, science and religion (Harris, Koenig, Corriveau & Jaswal, 2018). However, we know much less about how testimony affects children’s moral thinking. In fact, many psychologists argue that morality is relatively impervious to direct testimonial influence, and emphasize children’s early emerging moral abilities and intuitions (Haidt, 2001; Hamlin, 2013; Smetana, 1981). These accounts are consistent with recent philosophical work holding that while testimony is an acceptable source for non-moral beliefs, it is problematic to acquire moral understanding via testimony (the asymmetry thesis, Hopkins, 2007). Is testimony really insufficient to transmit moral understanding?

In order to address this question, we first draw attention to recent philosophical work on skepticism towards moral testimony. We then review the literature on children’s moral development and testimonial learning and make the argument that testimony plays an indispensable role in children’s acquisition of moral understanding. Lastly, we discuss how the study of moral testimony could be supported by appreciating a set of important distinctions (e.g., different levels of dependence, different types of testimony, different costs and benefits) to aid our theorizing and empirical work on testimonial learning in the moral domain.