Cognitive Development最新文献

Prosody is used to indicate emotions, disambiguate syntax, and provide meaning. Less is known about prosody in word learning, but congruent prosody (e.g., loud/low pitch for large) leads to better memory than incongruent prosody (e.g., quiet/high pitch for large) for novel adjectives in adults (Shintel, Anderson, & Fenn, 2014). Children may also benefit from congruent prosodic information in word learning. This current research explores prosodic congruency and novel adjective learning in adults (Study 1) and preschool children (Study 2). Participants learned novel adjectives that were either congruent or incongruent in prosody and then they were tested in an implicit/picture task and an explicit/definition task. Although the prosody was not necessary to learn the words, the congruent condition showed greater accuracy than the incongruent condition across both tasks for adults and for the explicit task for children. This is the first demonstration that preschool children can benefit from congruent prosody, not just for referent selection, but also for learning novel adjectives.

Empathic concern for others plays a central role for human cooperation and is proposed to be key in moral development. Developmental theories disagree on the age of emergence of empathic concern in human ontogeny and the factors supporting its early development. To assess different theoretical views, the current study longitudinally assessed infants’ (N = 127) reactions towards an experimenter and their mothers simulating pain at 6, 10, 14, and 18 months. As an emotional control condition, infants’ reactions towards a laughing experimenter were assessed. Maternal sensitivity, children’s temperamental emotionality, and self-recognition were included as predictors. True intraindividual change models were applied to capture the growth of empathic concern in early development. Overall, there were minor and inconsistent differences in children’s responses to laughing and crying others in the first year of life, whereas clear differences emerged in the second year. At 6 months, scale values of empathic concern were significantly related to measures of infant distress suggesting that infants experience emotional contagion and not veridical empathic concern. At 18 months, children’s concern towards the experimenter was related to their concern towards their mother. Maternal sensitivity, negative emotionality and self-recognition were related to children’s empathic concern within the second year. These findings suggest that empathic concern emerges in the second year and point to a gradual emergence of concern for others in human ontogeny.

When reading complex expository texts, comprehension benefits from metacognitive monitoring of the comprehension process, which, in part, relies on memory and reasoning abilities that decrease with age. In a cross-sectional study, we examined age-related differences regarding metacognitive comprehension monitoring in adults aged between 50 and 77 (N = 176, M = 63;10 years, SD = 6;2). As an indicator of comprehension monitoring, we considered the number of detected inconsistencies in an inconsistency task. Our findings indicated a moderate but steady decrease of comprehension monitoring, which was mediated via a decrease in verbal intelligence. Besides this negative effect of age, we found a positive effect of educational attainment on comprehension monitoring. Thus, continued experience with texts, for instance provided in jobs that require a university degree, appears to positively affect comprehension monitoring. There was, however, no evidence of a compensatory effect of education on age-related declines in comprehension monitoring.

Executive Functions (inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and working memory) mediate the relationship between socioeconomic status and reading. However, little is known of the roles of individual executive functioning components in mediating the socioeconomic-reading achievement gap, especially in low- and middle-income countries. In Côte d’Ivoire, children experience many socioeconomic disadvantages (i.e., fewer household resources, maternal illiteracy), and kinship fostering (child in care of extended family while parents pursue economic opportunities elsewhere) is prevalent. This study examines the relation between executive functioning components, socioeconomic risks, and reading among 5th grade children in rural Côte d’Ivoire (N = 369). Poorer working memory mediated the relationship between higher cumulative socioeconomic risk (poverty, maternal illiteracy, fostering) and lower reading scores. Further, working memory fully mediated the negative effects of fostering risk on reading scores. Results suggest that executive functioning components are differentially impacted by environmental socioeconomic risks and play different roles in supporting reading development.

This study aimed to shed light on the causal frameworks utilized by children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds; n = 92) and adults (n = 30) to understand the transmission of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants’ use of two prominent causal frameworks was examined: (1) a mechanical framework appealing to germ transfer and internalization (e.g., “Breathing people’s air sends germs into your body”), and (2) a biological framework appealing to the notion that germs are living things (e.g., “The virus lives and multiplies inside the body”). Results showed that participants at all ages relied on the mechanical framework to explain the transmission of COVID-19. Adults also invoked the biological framework in their explanations; however, 5- to 9-year-olds showed little evidence of biological reasoning. Findings are interpreted in terms of the potential role of the COVID-19 pandemic in shaping children’s knowledge and the implications of these findings for health and safety.

The current study examined the mediating role of analogical reasoning in the relationships among working memory, inhibitory control, and children’s mathematical skills. Two hundred fifty-one students from first to third grades were tested on visual-spatial working memory, verbal working memory, inhibitory control, analogical reasoning, and different mathematical skills (i.e., symbolic number processing and mathematical reasoning). After controlling for age and gender, analogical reasoning significantly contributed to both symbolic number processing and mathematical reasoning. The relationship between verbal working memory and symbolic number processing, as well as the relationship between verbal working memory and mathematical reasoning, were significantly mediated by analogical reasoning. The exploratory analyses further revealed that there was no significant age difference in the roles of analogical reasoning. These results highlight the important role of analogical reasoning in explaining the relationships among working memory, inhibitory control, and children’s different mathematical abilities. The findings also indicate that analogical reasoning, the ability of identifying and processing critical relational information, may be a potential avenue to improve children’s mathematical skills.

Inhibitory control (IC) and Approaches to Learning (AtL) are two critical domain-general indicators of school readiness that develop rapidly in early childhood and are associated with children's academic outcomes. IC undergoes rapid developmental changes between the ages of 3 and 5, and more studies are needed to examine this change over time. AtL describes how children learn in a classroom, and as such, it may mediate the relationship between IC and academic outcomes. AtL may mediate the relationship between IC and academic achievement for children; growth in IC supports children's ability to direct attention to teachers and peers during interactions, while AtL helps children persist and seek learning opportunities during interactions. Using the Age 3 cohort from the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey 2009 (FACES 2009), a latent growth curve analysis was used to examine how both the initial level and growth of IC in HS years to kindergarten were associated with children's academic outcomes in kindergarten as well as the potential mediational role of AtL. The intercept and slope of IC were found to predict children's abilities in AtL, language, and math scores in kindergarten. Moreover, AtL was identified as a mediator between the development of IC and the subsequent gains in math skills from Head Start to kindergarten. These findings underscore the significance of fostering IC development before children enter kindergarten, with AtL emerging as a crucial factor influencing their achievements in mathematics.

How can we improve children’s attitudes toward and their treatment of disabled peers? One way is by targeting the model that non-disabled children hold about disability, which in Western cultures tends to be that the challenges disabled people face arise from intrinsic factors, or characteristics inherent to the individual (i.e., the medical model of disability). In this paper, we describe a model of disability that highlights external factors contributing to the challenges disabled people face (i.e., the social model). Drawing on research showing that children’s attitudes toward other stigmatized groups can be improved as they learn about structural explanations for group disparities, we suggest that exposing children to the social model of disability may have similarly beneficial effects on the ways they think about and treat disabled peers. We highlight some challenges that this approach may encounter–challenges that, we argue, cognitive developmentalists are well-positioned to address.

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.