Developmental Science最新文献

We regularly make decisions under uncertainty, but the same decision can feel different when made under physical uncertainty, where a decision maker must guess at an outcome that has not yet occurred, and epistemic uncertainty, where the outcome has occurred but is unknown to the decision maker. Past research suggests that children prefer epistemic to physical uncertainty, but findings are conflicted as to whether this preference diminishes or even reverses over the course of development. We examined children's and adolescents’ uncertainty preferences in three populations: urban communities in Iran (N = 100) and the United States (N = 56), and hunter-horticulturalist Tsimané communities in Bolivia (N = 54). In Bolivia and the United States, children preferred epistemic uncertainty, choosing games where they guessed an unknown outcome after it occurred, rather than before. Children in Iran showed the same pattern but no significant preference. Importantly, there were no age-related differences in preferences, challenging the idea that there may be a developmental shift toward preferring physical uncertainty. The observed consistency across participants, including those with no exposure to dice, suggests cultural familiarity with these artifacts may not be a major factor influencing decisions. Future research should examine whether apparent differences in adults’ and children's preferences in prior studies might reflect a difference between hypothetical and in vivo decision-making rather than a developmental difference.

Summary

Visual attention develops rapidly across the first postnatal year, from reflexive eye movements driven by low-level stimulus properties to increasingly voluntary eye movements influenced by higher-order factors. To test the hypothesis that development reflects guidance by increasingly abstract features, we used representational similarity analysis to evaluate the representational link between gaze patterns (N = 47 5–7-month-old infants, N = 46 10–12-month old infants, N = 45 adults) and measurements of fMRI cortical activity patterns from adult participants as they viewed scenes from the Natural Scenes Dataset. We found that similarities across scenes for fixation patterns and neural activity patterns were significantly related only for low-level visual regions in younger infants but were related to mid-level regions in older infants and adults. These results support the hypothesis that, over development, visual attention shifts from being driven by the kinds of simple features represented in early visual cortex to being driven by the kinds of more abstract features found in mid-level areas of adult visual cortex. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIV9QB0Uq8.

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Cheating emerges early in development and has significant moral development implications. This research investigated whether cheating in 5- to 6-year-olds reflects strategic decision-making or impulsivity. Through four preregistered studies, we systematically manipulated adult presence and observability across multiple conditions using a challenging math test paradigm. Study 1 (N = 150) demonstrated that children cheated least when an adult was visible (6%), moderately when only audible (20%), and the most when neither visible nor audible (48%). Study 2 (N = 150) revealed that this effect was driven by whether the adult could readily observe children's cheating, rather than by her mere presence. Studies 3 and 4 (N = 50 each) further showed that children strategically adjusted their behavior based on how readily their cheating could be detected. These findings challenge the notion that preschoolers’ deceit is primarily driven by impulsivity, suggesting that at age 5–6, children can make sophisticated deceptive decisions based on social context and circumstances.

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Teachers and parents often scaffold children to help others. Not all help is equally beneficial, however. We know very little about the ways in which children distribute different types of help. Across three preregistered studies, we examined when children provide others with help that can hamper learning (outcome-oriented help, e.g., correct answers) and when they provide beneficial help (mastery-oriented help, e.g., hints). Dutch children (total N = 532, 7–12 years) helped peers from different ethnic groups with difficult and easy tasks. In all three studies, children provided less mastery-oriented help when tasks were difficult. Children also gave less mastery-oriented help to Black peers when tasks were difficult, but only when they liked this ethnic group (Studies 1 and 2). Conversely, children helped White and Middle-Eastern children similarly (Study 3). Children might thus not always provide help that is beneficial to recipients in the long run, particularly when things get difficult and recipients belong to other ethnic groups they like.

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Cognitive control shows two main developmental trends: greater self-directedness (i.e., children need less external scaffolding) and greater proactiveness (i.e., children increasingly anticipate and prepare for upcoming cognitive demands). The present study examined potential links between these major developmental transitions. Specifically, it used EEG oscillations to investigate the extent to which children, like adults, engage self-directed control in a proactive fashion, and whether age-related changes reflect progress in task selection, motor preparation, or both. Five–6-year-olds, 9–10-year-olds, and adults performed a voluntary task-switching paradigm in which visual support for past actions was manipulated. Both children and adults showed greater frontolateral delta/theta power and lower central mu power on switch than repeat trials, but visual support differentially affected these oscillatory markers across age groups. Children already engage self-directed control proactively from 5 to 6 years of age in the voluntary task-switching paradigm, albeit differently than adults, suggesting close links between self-directed and proactive control developments.

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There are long-held concerns regarding the impact of screen media on children's cognitive development. In particular, fast pace and fantastical events have been theorized to deplete children's cognitive resources, leading to reductions in their attention and executive functions (EF). To date, however, empirical tests of short-term effects of media pace and fantasy on children's cognition have yielded mixed findings. In the present study, we conducted meta-analytic syntheses of previous findings on the impact of pace (19 studies involving 141 effect sizes based on 1431 1.5- to 10-year-olds) and fantasy (16 studies involving 121 effect sizes based on 1297 1.5- to 6-year-olds) on children's attention and EF immediately after media exposure. Overall, our findings revealed that media pace does not affect children's cognition (d = –0.123, 95% CI [–0.331, 0.086], p = 0.23). In contrast, media fantasy was found to have a negative effect, wherein children who watched fantastical media compared to realistic media performed worse on attention and EF tasks immediately post-viewing (d = –0.244, 95% CI [–0.442, –0.046], p = 0.02). The large heterogeneity in effects for both pace (95% PI [–1.100, 0.854]) and fantasy (95% PI [–1.120, 0.632]), however, points to the complexity in conditions under which media exposure differentially impacts children's cognition—in some cases, negatively, in others positively, or not at all. Of the moderators tested, our findings point to the influence of facet of cognition examined (attention, cognitive flexibility, higher order EF, inhibitory control, working memory) on the strength of short-term media exposure effect.

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Gender nonconforming (GN) children are at higher risk of experiencing bullying and social exclusion than are gender conforming (GC) children. Nonetheless, very little is known about the socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying children's bias against GN peers. The present study was the first to examine children's dehumanization of GN peers (developmental trajectory, form, and link to bullying). Chinese children in Hong Kong (N = 472; in four age groups: 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, and 11–12 years) were assessed individually in an in-person experimental study. Children were shown experimentally manipulated vignettes of four hypothetical peers (GC boy, GC girl, GN boy, and GN girl). Next, children's blatant and subtle dehumanization of these peers, and their propensity to bully these peers, were assessed. In the blatant dehumanization task, children rated how human-like/insect-like each peer was using a visual scale with a continuous slider. For subtle dehumanization, a mind perception task was used to assess the frequency and diversity of mental state words spontaneously used by children to describe videos associated with different peers. Children also completed questions assessing bullying tendency. By age 9–10 years, children dehumanized GN peers both blatantly and subtly, regardless of peer gender. Older children rated GN peers as less human-like/more insect-like than GC peers and also spontaneously attributed fewer and less diverse mental states to GN peers than to GC peers. According to multilevel moderated mediation analyses, blatant dehumanization partially explained older children's tendency to bully GN peers. Further research may develop interventions aimed at reducing children's dehumanization of GN peers.

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This commentary builds on Scaff et al.’s (2025) systematic review of the CHILDES database, highlighting persistent biases in child language corpora and research. We expand the discussion, emphasizing three key areas: (1) the need to diversify naturalistic data across languages to strengthen language acquisition theories; (2) the importance of including diverse child and parent demographics within specific language environments; and (3) the underrepresentation of bilingual samples from non-WEIRD, non-Indo-European contexts. We argue that these limitations not only hinder generalizability but also shape prevalent theoretical assumptions. Promoting inclusive, globally representative corpora is important for advancing a fair and accurate understanding of child language acquisition.

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