Cognitive Development最新文献

We examined U.S. and Canadian children’s (n = 214) and adults’ (n = 72) belief in ability contagion – an expected improvement in performance when using a celebrity’s object (e.g., superior tennis skills when using Serena Williams’s racquet). Four- to 7-year-olds preferred using a celebrity to a non-celebrity object, but their performance on a related task did not differ depending on which object they used (Study 1). Adults and 5- to 8-year-olds expected that a celebrity object would lead to superior performance in a forced-choice paradigm (Study 2), but not when given the option to state that the objects were the same (Study 3), even though adults and older children (> 7.01 years) judged the celebrity object to have an enhanced worth. We find that participants do not believe in ability contagion using either implicit or explicit measures. We discuss implications of our results for versions of contagion accounts of celebrity objects.

Block construction is ubiquitous in early development, yet is surprisingly complex, involving step-by-step sequenced actions to create specific structures. Here, we use novel analytic methods to characterize these action sequences in detail, including which individual parts of the structure (‘states’) are built and how these structures are combined, creating a fully specified build path towards the final structure. We find that, like adults tested in a previous study, 4- to 8-year-olds build by creating a small subset of possible individual states and full build paths, and that they prioritize building layer-by-layer. The individual states and build paths that children produce are strikingly similar to those of adults, resulting in structures that are more stable than other possible (but not attested) states and paths. Our approach serves as a lens into the cognitive processes underlying block building and suggests that children’s building is guided by significant cognitive constraints consistent with “computational thinking”.

Anthropomorphised animals are a prevalent character type in children’s books. However, stories with fantastical protagonists are associated with poorer social learning than those with human protagonists. We explored whether children’s representations of characters’ internal states and dialogue in story retells were related to story character realism (anthropomorphised animal, human), story theme (sharing, busyness), age, and vocabulary. Three- to seven-year-olds (N = 171) listened to one of four versions of an illustrated storybook that manipulated character realism and theme. Developmental trends were evident: Older children included more internal state references and dialogue in their retells than younger children. Of note, children retelling a prosocial story with human protagonists included more socio-relational language than those retelling a busy-themed story featuring humans; the same advantage was not evident for stories with animal protagonists. These findings imply that realistic protagonists may elicit more robust representations of social ideas in the minds of young children.

Informal educational opportunities such as visits to museums, aquariums, and zoos support children’s semantic knowledge gain. Most research focuses on outcomes of direct learning, such as factual recall. The extent to which children engage in productive memory processes such as inferential reasoning and self-derivation through memory integration is not yet well understood. We assessed 8- to 9-year-old children’s performance on tests of direct (e.g., fact recall) and productive (e.g., inference, integration) learning from virtual museum exhibits. We also examined the influence of children’s involvement on learning outcomes, through measuring within-exhibit dyadic conversation and post-exhibit reflection. Children performed successfully on all three tests of learning; fact recall was the most accessible and self-derivation was the least. Both within and post-exhibit involvement predicted overall learning outcomes; within-exhibit conversational phrases predicted self-derivation performance in particular. The current work provides novel insights into mechanisms that support children’s informal learning.

Both ability and motivation underlie uniquely human prosociality but the study of resource allocation in young children has focused on prosocial motivations rather than mathematical ability to fairly allocate rewards. We examined the development of fair sharing by testing 3–6YO children at two time points (N at Time 1 = 158, N at Time 2 =111) with ToM, IQ, fractional quantities (proper or improper fraction problems), and framing of the problem (social or non-social) as predictors of children’s performance. As expected, children performed better with time and age, and on proper versus improper fractions. However, in contrast to our predictions, performance was not consistently related to general IQ, ToM, or framing of the problem although ToM interacted with age and framing to predict performance. Our results suggest that it is important to consider limitations in numerical ability rather than assuming selfish motivations when young children fail to share fairly.

Children’s usage of mental state verbs can reveal evidence of their theory of mind and general cognitive development. Children produce a certain class of mental state verbs, namely desire verbs such as want, like, and love, early in development. Among these desire verbs, they produce want the most frequently. We report on a corpus study of 450 + instances of want as gathered from children’s dialogues with caretakers in the CHILDES database. We developed a novel coding scheme to measure children’s use and understanding of want utterances: i.e., we analyzed the kinds of things that children described wanting for themselves or others, as well as the agents to whom they ascribed desires. We report on the frequencies of these features across the ages of 24 to 59 months (2–4 years of age), and highlight noteworthy trends in the way children used want. Children appear to talk about their own desires most often; they primarily use questions to talk about second person desires; and they describe more complex desires as they mature. We describe how these patterns of linguistic competency may serve as an index for the development of mechanisms that underlie mental state reasoning.

The present study investigates individual differences in preterm children’s language skills in relation to neonatal risk and Joint Attention (JA) skills. Fifty-four mother-child (Mchildage=37.89 months; SD=11.51) and 35 father-child (Mchildage=36.75 months; SD=11.86) dyads participated in the study. Neonatal risk was assessed using medical reports/parental questionnaires. JA characteristics (frequency, duration, type of JA, agent of initiation and termination, missed attempts) were coded moment-by-moment during free-play interactions with mothers and fathers, separately. Language outcomes were measured via the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-3rd Edition and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-4th Edition. Preterm children with lower neonatal risk scores and who had higher proportions of Coordinated JA with their mothers and fathers achieved higher language scores. Hierarchical linear regression analyses indicated that neonatal risk and Coordinated JA with mothers and fathers (separately) explained unique variance in preterm children’s language outcomes.

Audiovisual speech integration during infancy is crucial for socio-cognitive development. A key perceptual cue infants use to achieve this is temporal synchrony detection. Although the current developmental literature on this ability is rich, unsolved disagreements obscure the interpretation of findings. Here, we propose conceptual and methodological issues that may have contributed to a still unclear picture of the developmental trajectory of sensitivity to temporal synchrony, particularly when studied in audiovisual fluent speech. We discuss several sources of confusion, including a lack of terminological precision, heterogeneity in the experimental manipulations conducted, and in the paradigms and stimuli used. We propose an approach that clarifies the definition and operationalization of sensitivity to temporal synchrony and explores its developmental course, emphasizing the role of infants’ linguistic experiences. Ultimately, we expect that our analytical review will contribute to the field by aligning theoretical constructs, proposing more fine-grained designs, and using stimuli closer to infants’ experiences.

We investigated whether preschool children’s extension of labels from memory representations of pictures is enhanced by exposure to multiple exemplars during teaching. Neurotypical 2-year-olds (N = 23) and 3-year-olds (N = 19) mapped novel word-picture associations in a referent selection task. Their retention and generalisation of labels was then assessed after 5 min with depicted 3-D objects. During referent selection, children were presented with a single variant of each novel picture (single exemplar condition) or two differently coloured variants of each novel picture (multiple exemplars condition). Both age groups extended labels to similarly coloured objects with significantly greater accuracy when taught with multiple exemplars. Three-year-olds also generalised labels to differently coloured category members with significantly greater accuracy in the multiple exemplars condition, where they outperformed two-year-olds. We propose that comparing multiple pictures of to-be-learned referents strengthens encoding of category-defining shape, facilitating extension of labels to objects from memory.

Learning to draw is an important developmental milestone that most children achieve during their preschool years. Primary caregivers play a significant role in supporting this process, which may affect the pace of acquisition and subsequent unfolding of drawing ability. In this study, we aimed to investigate parental support in the context of children's drawing activity, complemented by quantifying the effects of four individual factor constructs of parental support for drawing. Our sample comprised 68 parent-child dyads with children aged 3.0–6.9 years. Parents completed an online survey about actions related to promoting the drawing abilities of their child, while children's drawing skill was measured with the Beery-Buktenica Test of Visual-Motor Integration. Contrary to our initial prediction, we found that parental support as a construct had no significant effect on children’s drawing skill. However, the component Scaffolding was positively associated with enhanced drawing skill. These results have important theoretical implications for understanding skill development within a cultural learning framework, and open up practical applications for art education and developmental studies.