Cognitive Development最新文献

The SNARC effect is a phenomenon in which the left hand reacts quickly to small numbers, and the right hand reacts quickly to large numbers. In this study, the symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects between 9-year-old children and adults were compared, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying these effects were examined in both groups. The findings indicate that children and adults exhibit significant symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects, with children having a stronger non-symbolic SNARC effect than adults. According to path analyses, visual perception and phonological awareness played important roles in children’s symbolic SNARC effect, whereas inhibitory control played an important role in adults’ symbolic SNARC effect. Three-dimensional mental rotation and phonological memory accounted for significant variance in the non-symbolic SNARC effect in children and adults. Working memory did not significantly contribute to symbolic or non-symbolic SNARC effects in children and adults. In sum, our findings would not only help understand the theoretical relationships among various cognitive skills and SNARC effects but also help to develop age-appropriate intervention programs related to the nature of spatial-numerical associations.

Research suggests a pattern of moderate early exploration (shifting from deck to deck) followed by exploitation (consistent choice from advantageous decks) characterizes good decision makers. The main goal of the current study was to use a person centered (latent profile analysis) to explore individual differences in strategy use for preschoolers (n = 274) on a variant of the Iowa Gambling task (IGT). The analysis resulted in three profiles: a profile made up of younger children who showed moderate initial exploration, but no exploitation, a profile of children who showed consistent high exploration, and a profile made up older children who showed initial exploration followed by high exploitation in the last half of the game. The profiles showed striking differences in choice and awareness on the preschool IGT variant. Examination of strategy use during decision making in young children has the potential to provide insight into early adaptive functioning.

Previous research has established that finger counting in arithmetic positively correlates with accuracy in 5 ½ to 8-year-old children. Whether this relation also exists in younger children was unknown until the present study in which 172 children aged 4 ½ years (M = 56 months) were followed over one year across 3 sessions spaced 6 months apart. Initially, we observed 31 children who calculated on their fingers to solve addition problems, they were 43 at session 2 and 66 at session 3. Even though a minority of children used their fingers at each session, establishing their developmental pathways in the use of finger counting revealed that more than a half of them had used their fingers at least in one of the three sessions (87 children out of 172). Using this strategy proved highly advantageous because, at each session, finger users were more accurate than non-finger users, which reproduces the observations made in older children. Moreover, when children did not use their fingers, they were always more accurate if they had used their fingers in a previous session than if they had not. Children were also more likely to present accuracy improvement between two sessions when finger counting was observed for the first time or was repeatedly observed across sessions than when it had never been observed or was not observed in the prior session. Finally, children who never used their fingers across the three sessions corresponded to children with the lowest performance in addition and the lowest intellectual capacities. These results show that finger counting not only improves addition performance but also maximizes young children’s chances to develop good addition skills.

One domain that has not been thoroughly investigated is children’s ability to categorize information, specifically conventional (known to others, no restrictions on sharing) and privileged (not known to others, restrictions on sharing). In Study 1, 73 four- and five-year-olds and adults classified conventional and privileged information by how it is shared. All age groups accurately classified the information types, though accuracy improved with age. In Study 2, 68 four- and 6-year-olds and adults were presented with scenarios where information type and how it was shared did not match (privileged but shared) and asked if it was conventional or privileged. Four-year-olds and adults categorized conventional information by its label and did so more than 6-year-olds, while there was no pattern for privileged information. These results support that even 4-year-olds can distinguish between conventional and privileged information, and categorization strategies may differ across age and type of information.

Existing evidence has revealed that geometrical intuitions develop spontaneously without formal education. However, empirical research exploring the development of specific intuitive geometric concepts, such as parallelism, is still lacking. To explore preschoolers’ intuition of parallelism, one of the most fundamental concepts in geometry, a series of deviant-detection items were presented to 96 3- to 5-year-old children. Children showed the ability to discriminate between parallel and intersecting lines at least from the age of 4. We grouped children as discriminators and non-discriminators based on their performance in discriminating parallel and intersecting lines without a cross point. For the children who succeeded in this discrimination, they could distinguish parallel lines from intersecting lines both with and without a visible cross point, although they were easily interfered with the visible cross point. Children also showed some naïve understanding of parallel curves and could extract common features from parallel lines and parallel curves, suggesting that the extension of their intuitions of parallelism might be more general than the definition in Euclidean geometry.

The goal was to specify the developmental trajectory of cardinal, ordinal, and spatial relational language comprehension and production. One hundred sixty-four 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old English-speaking children viewed a row of toy cars and were asked to place the appropriate car(s) into a toy garage based on the label provided (Give Me) or to produce the correct label for the specified car(s) (Tell Me). Children were tested using cardinal (one, three, five), ordinal (first, third, fifth), and spatial (front, middle, back) labels. Language performance improved with age, especially for spatial labels. Language performance was more accurate for cardinal labels than for spatial and ordinal labels. Performance was quite accurate for cardinal labels regardless of condition, whereas comprehension was higher than production for spatial and ordinal labels.

Previous research suggests that children differ substantially in their sensitivity to positive and negative parenting qualities. In a Swiss sample of N = 264 (M_age: 6.0 years, 50.4% female, 15% migration background), we examined the interaction between parenting and children’s sensitivity on executive functions (EF). Results showed that EF performance tended to be higher for sensitive children whose parents reported more involved parenting and tended to be lower for sensitive children whose parents reported the use of corporal punishment. No such effects emerged for less sensitive children. The results suggest that parenting quality may be more strongly related to EF performance in more sensitive children compared to less sensitive children.

The modulation of cognitive control by rewards has long been discussed, but there is scarce evidence of how social and non-social rewards influence cognitive control in childhood, especially in the preschool years. Critically, sociality has often been confounded with other important reward dimensions (e.g., tangibility) in prior studies, hence potentially misestimating the effect of social rewards. Thus, the present study re-examined the effects of social and non-social rewards on cognitive control, particularly on proactive and reactive control engagement during childhood. Thirty 5- to 6-year-olds and thirty 9- to 10-year-olds completed an AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT) during an online session in three conditions: control, social reward, and non-social (i.e., monetary) reward conditions. Social rewards increased younger and older children’s response accuracy, suggesting greater cognitive control. However, no influence on how children engage cognitive control (i.e., proactively or reactively) was observed. The provision of non-social rewards did not influence cognitive performance in either group of children. When controlling for other reward dimension, we found evidence that social rewards, but not non-social rewards, can promote cognitive control performance in childhood.

Understanding the magnitude of rational numbers is crucial for mathematical development. However, children do not readily integrate the quantity of fractions and decimals and are even less likely to show a linear representation of fractions and decimals. Thus, the current study examined whether college-aged individuals show spontaneous quantity integration across distinct notations of rational numbers, whether rational number representation would resemble a number line, and whether their rational number representation predicts algebra performance. Further, we examined whether math anxiety plays a role. We found that college students do develop linear representation integrating the quantity between fractions and decimals. Quantitative representation of rational numbers predicted higher algebra scores. Linearity was not a significant predictor for algebra performance. The relations remained even after controlling for math anxiety. Implications for numerical understanding as well as math achievement are discussed.

It has been proposed that humans use non-numerical features (such as convex hull and surface area) to estimate the number of objects in a scene. This would be an evolutionarily advantageous strategy if such features truly patterned with number in the world, but this has never been empirically tested. Here, we quantify the strength of the relationship between number and non-numerical features in two relevant image sets: the illustrations from children’s counting books, and real-world photographs. We find that non-numerical features are much less predictive of the number of objects in counting books than in photographs, despite the former being specifically designed for use in teaching children about numbers. Then, across three behavioral experiments, we ask whether the stronger relationship in photographs predicts better number estimation performance in adults (N = 120) and in children (N = 94; M age = 7;2 years). Our experiments reveal that number estimation is easier from the counting books than the photographs, even though non-numerical features are less predictive of number in books. This analysis uses real-world stimuli and draws into question the claim that non-numerical features are intrinsically involved in number extraction.