Cognitive Development最新文献

Basic statistical literacy is essential for interpreting external sources and developing critical thinking skills necessary for engagement in real-world contexts. However, many children and adults struggle with understanding and interpreting data. Therefore, it is critical to develop engaging, effective methods for teaching early data analysis, as they could enhance children’s statistical understanding, math, and higher-order thinking skills. We examined the effectiveness of a home-based, experimental game intervention for children’s (ages 5–6, 50 % female, 67 % white, 12 % Asian, 8 % biracial) statistical understanding and math skills. Families (majority high household income and parent education) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: graphing board game, graphing card game, or literacy board game. Children in the graphing conditions improved on statistical understanding and arithmetic, and children in the literacy condition did not. These results support the development of play-based materials to promote early mathematical and statistical skills, with implications for children’s mathematical development.

Children evaluate others based on how they speak, but do children evaluate others based on how they are spoken to? We examined how U.S. children and adults (N = 170 5- to 10-year-olds, 49 % female; 107 adults; in a city with a foreign population of 17.9 %) evaluated addressees of Foreigner Talk (i.e., slow, loud, simplified speech). In Study 1, children and adults evaluated Foreigner Talk addressees more negatively than Peer Talk or Teacher Talk addressees. In Study 2, adults and older children incorporated Foreigner Talk with additional contextual cues to inform their evaluations: a local peer receiving Foreigner Talk received lower evaluations than a foreign peer receiving Foreigner Talk. With medium to large effect sizes, these studies indicate the importance of speech register in children’s social inferences.

This quasi-experimental study investigates the intricate relationship among adolescents’ physical activity, working memory, and academic performance, recognizing their significance in adolescent development. Employing a quasi-experimental design, 85 13-year-olds from a Taiwanese junior high school were involved. Data scrutiny was facilitated through Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), with the mediation effect explored via Smart Partial Least Squares structural equation modeling (Smart PLS-SEM). Findings indicate significant improvements in physical fitness among both aerobic and resistance exercise groups compared to controls. Additionally, both exercise cohorts demonstrated a stronger positive association with verbal working memory scores than the control group. Intriguingly, visuospatial working memory fully mediated the relationship between resistance exercise and science performance. These results highlight the potential advantages of incorporating brief daily exercise sessions to bolster adolescent physical fitness and emphasize the mediating function of working memory in connecting physical activity with academic accomplishment. This study furnishes valuable insights for educators and policymakers striving to enhance adolescent well-being and academic achievement through targeted interventions.

The present study investigated the moderation effect of visual temporal processing among the relationship between early picture book interaction experience and Chinese character reading of Chinese children with and without dyslexia. In total 118 Chinese children aged 8 to 10 years old were recruited from Taiwan. Half of them were typical learners, while the other half were identified as having dyslexia. We found children with typically developing showed significantly higher levels of early picture book interaction experience and visual temporal processing compared to those with dyslexia. Also, two groups of participants showed distinct profiles of visual temporal processing, early picture book interaction experience, and Chinese character reading. For typically developing students, visual temporal processing significantly contributed to Chinese character reading. In contrast, for students with dyslexia, the interaction between visual temporal processing and early picture book interaction experience was a significant predictor, and early picture book interaction experience’s significant contribution to Chinese character reading was only found for those who had better visual temporal processing.

Surprisingly little is known about how informational relevance guides children’s informing decisions. Although prior studies have demonstrated that children selectively inform and teach others these studies do not directly address whether children consider informational relevance specific to an outgroup member. We also know that children by age 5 and 6 show robust preferences for their ingroup members in various decisions but does information relevance modulate their ingroup preferences? In three experiments (N = 180), we investigated whether Iraqi Kurdish 6-year-old children expect others to inform an ingroup member or an outgroup member, depending on the informational relevance. In Experiment 1 children expected others to inform an ingroup member rather than an outgroup member irrespective of information type – extending prior work on ingroup preferences. In experiments 2 and 3, in which the relevance of the information to an outgroup member was highlighted, children’s expectation about informing an ingroup member was modulated by information type. Together, the findings suggest that children consider informational relevance to guide their expectations about others’ selective informing in the context of group membership, which could further explain how cultural knowledge is maintained and reinforced among members of the same cultural group.

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.