Developmental Science最新文献

There are individual differences in how people respond to emotionally ambiguous cues (i.e., valence bias), which have important consequences for mental health, development, and social functioning, yet how these differences develop in childhood and adolescence is unknown. Extensive literature shows that children's cognitive biases, including appraisals in uncertain situations, can be influenced by parents. The current study collected valence bias from parent and child dyads (n = 136, children ages 6–17 years, M = 10.92, SD = 3.22) using a dual-valence ambiguity task (i.e., the valence bias task). Using structural equation modeling, we found that a child's valence bias was associated with their parent's valence bias (β = 0.283, p = 0.005). We also explored the effect of parent–child attachment in three facets (communication, alienation, and trust) on this intergenerational transmission. Communication moderated the relationship between parent and child valence bias, such that higher communication led to a stronger relationship between parent and child valence bias (β = 0.03, p = 0.04). These findings suggest that one mechanism that supports valence bias development is the parent's bias, and this may be uniquely influenced by the degree of parent–child communication. This tendency to similarly interpret ambiguous stimuli may result from social learning. Specifically, our results support a theory of generalized shared reality where parents and children who have a greater interpersonal connection (i.e., communication) also share a more similar world view (i.e., valence bias). A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlSDxFDmP7g

Summary

A key milestone in the development of fairness is disadvantageous inequity aversion: a willingness to sacrifice valuable rewards to avoid receiving less than a peer. The equal respect hypothesis suggests that, in addition to material concerns, children are also motivated to reject disadvantageous inequity due to interpersonal concerns. To test this prediction, we investigated how young children (N = 184, ages 4–7) respond to receiving less of the objects they explicitly do not desire across three pre-registered experiments. We found that, from 4 years old, children are averse to receiving unequal offers of undesirable objects (Experiment 1) and are even willing to sacrifice a high-value reward to reject inequality of undesirable objects (Experiment 2). Children are less likely to refuse unequal offers of undesirable objects when the distributor provides a reason for giving them less (Experiment 3). Together, these studies demonstrate that interpersonal concerns play a key role in motivating the costly rejection of inequity.

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Reciprocity is a cornerstone of human cooperation, motivating individuals to assist each other at a personal cost, resulting in mutual long-term benefits. However, reciprocity can conflict with honesty norms, such as when returning favors to previous benefactors requires individuals to act dishonestly. The resulting moral dilemmas are difficult to navigate even for adults, yet developmental research has almost exclusively focused on the prosocial aspects of reciprocity. To explore the developmental origins of this conflict, we investigated 5- to 8-year-old children's evaluations of and engagement in prosocial cheating to return a favor. In Study 1, children evaluated protagonists in hypothetical scenarios who cheated to benefit others whom they did or did not owe a favor. Across ages, children condemned cheating and favored honesty over reciprocity from a third-party perspective. In Study 2, children participated in two games in which they had the opportunity to cheat (by peeking behind a barrier or misreporting die-rolling outcomes, respectively) to win prizes for an adult partner who had either previously shared a valued resource with them (reciprocity condition) or not (control condition). Across ages, children were more likely to benefit a partner by cheating when they owed them a favor than when they did not owe them a favor. These findings suggest that children as young as 5 are willing to disregard honesty in favor of reciprocating prosocial acts, highlighting the developmental origins of a tension between interpersonal obligations and moral norms.

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Reach-to-grasp behavior is a key developmental milestone in infants, involving coordinated actions such as arm transport, hand pre-shaping, and hand opening and closing. Vision guides the development of these skills, and delays in visual input can impact infants with early visual impairments. However, the effects of a congenital visual impairment on reach-to-grasp behavior in early life remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we compared the reach-to-grasp abilities of sighted (S) and visually impaired (VI) infants and children, focusing on temporal (Movement and Pick-up times) and motor parameters (body midline crossing with one or two hands and hand preference). We hypothesized that VI children would face greater challenges in planning and executing a rapid and accurate reach-to-grasp movement, particularly during the pick-up phase. To investigate this, we asked sighted and VI infants and children to grasp black spheres of different sizes, placed centrally, on the right, or the left of a table in a dimly lit room. Three key findings emerged from our analysis. First, VI children required more time to pick up the spheres compared to their sighted peers. Second, VI children showed a reduced frequency of one-handed body midline crossing when reaching for lateral spheres, but showed an age-related increase, especially when using both hands. Third, VI children showed no hand preference, unlike S children who favored their right hand for crossing the body midline. These results highlight the role of visual experience in developing effective goal-directed movements and support creating early evidence-based rehabilitation procedures. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/bjwkMQmdFoE.

Summary

Working memory (WM) is a critical cognitive system that supports processing a variety of information. Remembering different types of objects may impose different levels of cognitive demands on WM performance. In the present study, we examined 205 children's WM in representing different types of content and its developmental trajectories in early childhood. Experiment 1 examined 5-year-olds’ WM performance when remembering different content (animals and dots). To control perceptual differences, Experiment 2 compared the same-age children's WM performance when the stimuli (e.g., three dots) needed to be encoded from different representational domains (perceptual domain: visuospatial representation; conceptual domain: numerical representation). In Experiment 3, we further investigated the early developmental trends of representing different types of information in WM between the ages of 3 and 5. Results showed that children's WM performance varied over different types of stimuli. When presented with the same stimuli, encoding different aspects of the content (conceptual vs. perceptual) may impose different levels of cognitive demands, and the performance of which was dependent on the WM loads. Together these findings informed our understanding of the role of representational content in children's WM development and provided empirical implications for considering the testing stimuli when designing WM measurements for young children.

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Scaff et al. present a comprehensive analysis of the CHILDES database, demonstrating clear demographic biases in its naturalistic language recordings. We concur with their conclusion that researchers need to be mindful of these biases when making theoretical claims based on CHILDES data. While we agree that more diversity is needed in future corpus collections, we also argue that a comparative approach to corpus analyses and computational modeling might help alleviate some of the current limitations of CHILDES.

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Studies in low-resource settings suggest that multiple aspects of early childhood development are sensitive to the relative poverty of a child's environment. We examined whether direct, quantitative measures of early developing cognitive functions show a similar association with relative poverty. Eye movement latencies were recorded in children at 7, 17, and 36 months in rural South Africa (N = 374). The latency to respond to the appearance of visual objects was inversely associated with a proxy measure of the child's socioeconomic environment (household asset ownership), with longer latencies observed in children from households with less asset-based resources. This gradient was detectable at 7 months, increased between 7 and 36 months, was not explained by differences in prior exposure to screens, and generalized to the latency of eye movements towards socially cued objects (i.e., pointing gestures that directed the child's attention to a specific object). Physical growth (height-for-age) and developmental milestone scores were lower in children from households with less resources. The results were replicated in an analysis of independent data from 31-month-old children collected in Zambia (N = 270). The results provide novel evidence for early emerging gradients in behaviors that are universal and mechanistically involved in learning and skill formation.

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Neighborhood adversity links to mental health and cognitive outcomes, but little is known about structural factors that may buffer these links. The current study addresses this gap by assessing the role of protective factors in the association of neighborhood deprivation, threat, and segregation with psychopathology symptoms and cognitive outcomes. Linear mixed models were run in ABCD sample participants (n = 5812) to test associations of neighborhood Area Deprivation Index (ADI; deprivation), crime (threat), and dissimilarity and interaction index (segregation) with attention difficulties, internalizing and externalizing symptoms, psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), and fluid and crystallized cognitive performance. School environment, neighborhood education child opportunity index, neighborhood cohesion, and green space were tested as moderators of the association of neighborhood adversity with outcomes. Higher neighborhood educational resources buffered the association of neighborhood deprivation with crystallized cognitive performance. The association of higher neighborhood crime with externalizing symptoms was weaker for youth in less supportive school environments. Further, higher neighborhood segregation was associated with internalizing symptoms more strongly for youth with more neighborhood educational resources. Taken together, results suggest adverse neighborhood environments are associated with higher psychopathology symptoms and lower cognitive performance. Access of neighborhood educational resources could buffer links of neighborhood deprivation and cognitive performance. While evidence of protective links was not widespread, studying these patterns is necessary for understanding possible environmental contributors to mental health and cognitive function. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpGkdPkPiSw.

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