Cognitive Development最新文献

Once children have acquired the cardinality principle, they understand that the last number-word used in counting represents the total number of objects in a set. This principle is often assessed using the “How many?” task, which consists in asking “How many?” objects there are in a set after children have counted them. However, we show in this study that out of 188 kindergarteners (mean age: 4 ½ years), 42 (22,3 %) succeeded in repeating the last count word in the “How many?” task but failed to correctly apply the one-to-one correspondence principle during counting. Even when only the easiest countable sets were considered (i.e., linear and homogeneous collections or sets with a very limited number of objects), still more than 10 % of children from our sample repeated the last count word but failed to apply the one-to-one correspondence principle. Such developmental profile, in which children understand that the last word used in counting represents the total number of objects in a set but fail to grasp that each individual object must be associated with a single number word to determine this total, is not psychologically plausible. We conclude that the “How many?” task leads to an inaccurate assessment of the cardinality principle, in both its basic and more meaningful conception, in a non-negligible number of young children.

Children’s perceptions of similarity and dissimilarity between in- and out-groups and their associations with intergroup attitudes were examined. Using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, 5- and 8-year-old Jewish-Israeli children (N = 100, 48 % girls) were investigated. They were asked about Arabs (which are considered a conflict out-group). Specifically, they were asked whether a Jewish girl/boy and an Arab girl/boy are similar or dissimilar and in what way. They were also asked about their attitudes towards Arabs. In general, children reported more intergroup dissimilarities than similarities between Jews and Arabs. Children’s perceptions revealed that they considered three types of properties as fundamental for intergroup (dis)similarity: appearance, psychological characteristics, and social identity. The results indicate that children form intergroup dissimilarity perceptions at an early age, but only at about 8 years of age do these perceptions become associated with negative attitudes towards the out-group. These findings highlight the importance of promoting early awareness of similarities between groups to mitigate the development of negative attitudes as children grow older.

Can children accurately date their early memories? This question has important real-life consequences such as when jurors evaluate the credibility of child eyewitness testimony in court. Answering this question is difficult given that adults present at remembered events may be inaccurate themselves in retroactively dating the memories recalled by their children, and often cannot provide reliable validation. In this study, prior to child interviews the parents of 6- to 13-year-olds provided eight memories of events with known dates, two each from when children were age 2, 3, 4, and 5 years. A total of 104 6- to 13-year-olds participated (47 % female, 70 % White and 26 % Asian or multi-ethnic), recruited from Canada (36 %) and USA (64 %). Children typically made systematic dating errors. Memories of events that had occurred when children had been age 2 were misdated by 1½ years on average, and as children’s age at the time of remembered events increased, misdating errors decreased. Errors usually involved children thinking they had been older at the time of remembered events than they actually were – a phenomenon termed ‘forward telescoping’ (versus ‘backward telescoping, when individuals think that they had been older at the time of remembered events than they actually had been). For example, many of the events from when children were age 2 were recalled by the children, but they misdated them to older ages. Although ‘age of memory’ (age of the child at the time of the remembered event) was significantly related to errors in dating, with more errors for memories from younger periods of their lives, ‘age of child’ at the time they did the memory task did not differ depending upon how old the children were. Findings have theoretical and forensic implications.

Research has consistently revealed the existence of an interconnection between reading comprehension, word reading, reading fluency, vocabulary and rapid naming. The main goal of this study was to explore the possible mediating role of reading fluency in the relationship between reading comprehension and the remaining skills, and to test whether the magnitude of these relationships was similar across different years of schooling. For this purpose, a longitudinal study with two assessment time points was carried out in a sample of 2nd and 3rd graders who were learning to read in European Portuguese, an intermediate-depth orthography. The results evidenced that reading fluency not only directly influences reading comprehension but also plays a mediating role in the relationship between reading comprehension and skills such as word reading and rapid naming. On other hand, the results indicate a unique effect of vocabulary on reading comprehension. Taken together, these results have important implications for educational practice, suggesting that explicit intervention in reading should include both the teaching and training in reading fluency and the construction of a richer lexical repertoire.

The argument and inquiry families of scientific thinking skills overlap. Yet they rarely are investigated together, with researchers instead focusing on one or the other. Here we hypothesize that inclusion of an additional intervention focused on inquiry will enhance the outcome of an established intervention known to be successful in developing argument skills, compared to the argument intervention alone. An Argument only (A) and an Argument and Inquiry (A&I) group of young adolescents participated in one or the other of these intensive intervention groups for four hours daily over a two-week period. Both groups made progress in argument skills as expected, but the A&I group showed greater gains in use of evidence to support claims, stronger forms of counterargument, and integrative however arguments that connect opposing claims to one another. The A&I group showed a particular advantage in reconciling contrasting claims, an epistemological understanding that lies at the core of scientific thinking. These findings suggest the value of conceptualizing argument skill development in a broader framework that includes an investigative component as well as the skill of coordinating claims and evidence that is fundamental to argument.

This study investigated whether contexts of failure improve preschool children’s mechanistic reasoning. We showed 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 55, M = 5;2) how to make an unfamiliar toy work to play a goal-directed game. Between conditions we manipulated children’s success in making the toy work by surreptitiously turning a hidden causal switch ON (Success) or OFF (Failure) before they interacted with the toy. We then measured children’s exploration of the toy, explanations for how the toy worked, and generalizations about how a new functioning toy would work. Children in the Failure condition were more likely to discover the hidden causal mechanism and talk about it in their explanations about the toy. Younger children spent more time exploring the toy than older children but were not more likely to discover the hidden causal mechanism. The findings are discussed as they relate to the emergence of spontaneous mechanistic exploration over development, how this then supports mechanistic reasoning, and the role of failure in children’s early causal reasoning.

Different lines of evidence indicate that the ability to communicate narratives coherently is related to children's social-emotional development. However, it is unknown whether narrative coherence is genre-specific or generalizes across autobiographical memories and fictive stories, and if autobiographical and fictive narratives show different or similar associations with mentalizing language, cognitive functions, social and daily functioning. Addressing these questions may provide important clues about the development of narrative communication skills in children and adolescents. We assessed 86 typically developing children and adolescents aged 7–14, examining narrative coherence and mentalizing complexity in six autobiographical memories and five fictional stories, alongside intellectual functioning and parent and teacher reports on social and adaptive functioning. Results showed that the measures on narrative coherence and mentalizing complexity, respectively, were associated across autobiographical memories and fictional stories. Moreover, narrative coherence and mentalizing complexity was related to each other on both fictive and autobiographical stories. Higher narrative coherence and mentalizing complexity on autobiographical memories were specifically related to better social-emotional reciprocity reported by teachers, who likely have more opportunities than parents to observe the child’s daily interaction with peers. Our findings suggest that narrative coherence and mentalizing language in school-aged children generalize across genres. Being able to communicate personal narratives coherently with use of mentalizing language appears to be important for the social-emotional interplay of children and adolescents.

The use of animations and puppet shows in developmental research has recently been questioned on external validity grounds. Do infants and children interpret symbolic stimuli (e.g., animated shapes, wooden circles) as required for a given measure of interest (e.g., as agents)? We review the arguments on both sides and conclude that external validity is not under threat by the mere use of symbolic stimuli. At the same time, the debate in its current formulation runs the risk of masking an important theoretical question: how do infants, children, and adults interpret such stimuli? We present the standard answer to the how-question (symbolic stimuli satisfy the input conditions of the cognitive domain under investigation) and contrast it with the under-explored possibility that these stimuli are interpreted the same way they have been generated (i.e., as representations).

It is well-established that individuals who grew up in adverse conditions tend to be slower on the Flanker Task. This finding is typically interpreted to reflect difficulty inhibiting distractions. However, it might result from slower general cognitive processes (e.g., reduced general processing speed), rather than the specific ability of inhibition. We used Drift Diffusion Modeling in three online studies (total N = 1560) with young adults to understand associations of adversity with Flanker performance. We found no associations between exposure to violence and unpredictability with inhibition. Yet, although mixed, violence and unpredictability exposure were associated with lower strength of perceptual input—how well someone can process target and distractor information alike. Finally, people with lower strength of perceptual input processed information more holistically, focusing less on details. Thus, lowered Flanker performance does not necessarily imply lowered inhibition ability. Cognitive modeling reveals a different picture of abilities in adverse conditions as opposed to analyses based on raw performance.

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of language status, language proficiency, cognitive control and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in bilingual Turkish-Dutch children’s language mixing in single-language settings. We investigated these factors over time following 31 children (20 with typical development, 11 with DLD), from the age of 5 or 6 years until they were 7 or 8 years old. Children more often mix the majority-societal language (Dutch) into the minority-heritage language (Turkish) than the other way around. Higher proficiency in Dutch, lower proficiency in Turkish, and having DLD are linked to more mixing in the Turkish setting. Effects of cognitive control on children’s language mixing are limited. Linguistic factors at a child-external and child-internal level impact on children’s mixing in single-language settings, and are more important than domain-general cognitive control. Increasing language proficiency in Turkish could explain why children mix less as they grow older.