Journal of Experimental Child Psychology最新文献

Main goals of the Numerical Understanding Mentored by Expert Researchers (NUMBERs) Workshop were to (A) identify key areas for math intervention research to promote systematic research in this area, (B) highlight research aligned with developing effective math interventions, and (C) provide a bird's eye perspective on building effective math interventions and broadening the research communities that strive to build them. During this workshop, mentor-and-mentee teams worked toward accomplishing these goals, which resulted in this Special Issue to inspire further progress in the field of mathematical cognition. In this brief overview of the NUMBERS workshop, we offer some details on the development of the workshop itself (to support others who may want to conduct similar workshops in their research domains) and briefly highlight some of the main themes of the workshop and articles within the special issue.

Experiment 1 employed a 4 × 2 × 2 mixed design to examine the effects of cooperative interactive games on VPT in children aged 5-8 years. Results demonstrated that: Cooperative interaction significantly enhanced VPT performance, with children exhibiting reduced egocentric responses. Experiment 2 adopted a within-subject design to evaluate long-term effects, revealing that gains diminished after one week and declined below post-intervention levels by three weeks. These findings provide novel evidence for theories of VPT development and social interventions.

This introductory article situates twelve empirical studies included in the special issue Integrating Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences into Experimental Developmental Science within a framework that bridges public health and developmental science perspectives on early adversity and buffering experiences. The special issue highlights how experimental and developmental researchers can both contribute to, and benefit from, the public health framework that gave rise to the study of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and positive childhood experiences (PCEs). Drawing on Kim and Royle's (2025) taxonomy, which organizes ACEs research by analytic treatment and developmental outcome domain, the included studies illustrate the varied ways that adversity and buffering experiences influence biological, cognitive, physical, psychological, and social functioning. Together, these contributions underscore the value of bridging epidemiological and experimental traditions, encouraging future developmental work that connects mechanisms of risk and resilience at the individual level with population-level applications in prevention, policy, and practice.

Executive function (EF), a set of cognitive processes essential for goal-directed behaviors, plays a vital role in cognitive and socioemotional development. Although previous research using performance-based tasks suggests that EF shifts from a unitary construct to a more multidimensional structure across childhood, these tasks often lack ecological validity. To address this, we investigated whether similar age-related differences could be observed using behavioral ratings. EF was assessed with the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function-2 (BRIEF-2) in a normative Dutch-speaking sample of children aged 5 to 12 years. Network analysis was the primary analytic approach, complemented by confirmatory factor analysis, to examine the structural differentiation of EF based on teacher reports (N = 1,110) and parent reports (N = 1,271). The results indicated that in teacher-reported networks, behaviors from inhibition and working memory components tended to show higher centrality, whereas in parent-reported networks, central behaviors spanned all three components, including shifting. Furthermore, each EF component appeared to include one or more connector hub behaviors, which showed relatively strong connections both within and across EF components. In terms of structural differentiation, both network analysis and confirmatory factor analysis provided converging evidence that EF was more differentiated in older compared to younger children, a pattern that was evident in parent-reported but not teacher-reported data. This study underscores the importance of multi-informant assessments and highlights the utility of combining network and latent variable approaches to capture age-related differences in EF structure in real-world settings.

Recent studies (Cheung et al., 2017; Chu et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2023) argue that children may infer the existence of infinite magnitudes through experience with number words, which provide a system of rules for generating ever-larger numbers. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the development of children's infinity beliefs in two languages - English and Hindi - whose counting systems differ with respect to the transparency of their rules. In a study with 240 four- to eight-year-old children, we found that children who learn to count in English (n = 120) demonstrated both greater counting proficiency and better understanding of the successor relations between numbers relative to children who learn to count in Hindi (n = 120). We also found that children's infinity beliefs were associated with their mastery of the verbal count list, but the proportion of children who endorsed the belief that numbers are infinite did not differ across languages. We conclude that transparency of the linguistic structure of a counting system may be important for understanding the rules governing counting, but in contrast to previous studies, suggest that the direct relationship between these rules and beliefs about the boundless nature of number words may be weak. The implications of these findings and avenues for future research are discussed.