Cognitive Development最新文献

Can moral rules change? We tested 129 children from the United States to investigate their beliefs about whether God could change widely shared moral propositions (e.g., “it’s not okay to call someone a mean name”), controversial moral propositions (e.g., “it’s not okay to tell a small lie to help someone feel happy”), and physical propositions (e.g., “fire is hotter than snow”). We observed an emerging tendency to report that God's ability to change morality is limited, suggesting that children across development find some widely shared aspects of morality to be impossible to change. Some beliefs did shift over development, however: 4- to 6-year-olds did not distinguish among God’s ability to change widely shared moral, controversial moral, and physical propositions, whereas 7- to 9-year-olds became increasingly confident that God could change physical and controversial moral propositions. Critically, however, younger children and older children alike reported that widely shared aspects of morality could not be altered. According to participants, not even God could change fundamental moral principles.

False belief understanding (FBU), a core component of Theory of Mind (ToM), refers to the capacity to understand that other individuals act according to their beliefs even when those beliefs are inaccurate. FBU is an important aspect of socio-cognitive development in early childhood. A range of sociodemographic, temperamental, cognitive, and family factors are known to contribute separately to individual differences in FBU; however, these domains are typically studied in silos. This longitudinal study aimed to examine which of these factors are associated with FBU around the time of school entry. We evaluated 102 typically developing children at 2–5.5 years (predictive factors) and then at 4–7.5 years of age (FBU). The findings indicate that cognitive and family factors during the preschool years are associated with FBU at school entry. Specifically, child vocabulary and parent-child interaction quality were significant independent predictors of FBU.

When encountered with a novel illness, children often ask for information about the illness and its impact on health from their parents. Although prior studies have explored how parents generally described the coronavirus to their children, there is an ambiguity in whether parents’ explanations about the coronavirus were about the coronavirus itself or about the pandemic more generally. Furthermore, it remains to be explored how parents responded to questions about the impact of the coronavirus on health. So, the current study explored how parents (N = 425) responded to specific questions that sought out information about the coronavirus and its impact. The results suggest that parents use their child’s specific questions as an opportunity to foster their child’s understanding about an illness. At the same time, parents also use their responses to shield their child from potential upsetting information about the impact of the coronavirus on health and well-being.

The current study proposes the Visual Attention Processing Protocol (VAPP), as a solution to the transferability of methods and scalability of singular attention tasks from toddlerhood to middle childhood. The VAPP was administered to 122 children ages 2- to 6-years-old. Consistent with our hypothesis, this task captured differences specific to orienting, alerting, and executive attention abilities across this age range. Furthermore, orienting was shown to have the least difference across age suggesting it is largely already developed by toddlerhood. The executive function block had the greatest changes among all tasks, indicating that it was the skill least developed at toddlerhood but the one with the most robust developmental gains by middle childhood. There were also developmental shifts in how well children regulate attentional control in the face of conflicting information across age groups—with results indicating that an added tone facilitated a faster response time in older children but interfered with accuracy in younger children. In addition, within- and between-group differences demonstrated the nuances of attentional abilities via error making as it relates to broader cognitive processes such as conflict resolution (e.g., specific to rule use), language (i.e., categorical sorting of items), and selective attention (i.e., direction of an object rather than the spatial location of an object). Together, results indicate a single paradigm can be sensitive to developmental gains in visual attention processing associated with efficiency and speed of responding from toddlerhood to middle childhood. Future directions and implications for clinical use are discussed.

Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Functioning (EF) are two pillars of human social cognition often studied in conjunction, but rarely considered together beyond childhood. Adults routinely undertake ToM activities of higher levels, such as those that require reasoning recursively through other individuals’ presumed reasoning about others (e.g., she believes that he believes that this is difficult to grasp). Yet, the possibility of links between EF and these special kinds of representations, termed second-order ToM, has been much less studied empirically. The objective of the current pre-registered report is to provide a meta-analytic review of the extant literature linking second-order ToM and EF in school-age children and adults. Studies reporting on the relation between EF and second-order ToM were located through systematic search of published and non-published research databases. A final set of 32 studies were meta-analyzed, providing 83 effect sizes and a pooled N of over 2584 child and adult participants. The developmental literature provided evidence of moderate second-order ToM-EF linkage in children (r = .25), which resisted statistical adjustment for age, and did not differ on the basis of children’s cultural background. In contrast, the adult findings were weaker (r = .09), and only accounted for a very small percentage of the meta-analyzed literature. Important methodological gaps were identified, highlighting the need for more research on the links between second-order ToM and EF.

We propose that integrated number sense, the ability to fluidly translate and compare magnitudes within and across notations, is central to understanding of rational numbers. Consistent with this hypothesis, two studies of 6th through 8th grade students (N = 264 and N = 46) indicated that accuracy comparing magnitudes within and across notations predicted overall math achievement and fraction number line and arithmetic estimation accuracy. Cross-notation magnitude comparison accuracy (i.e., fraction vs. decimal, percentage vs. fraction, and percentage vs. decimal) accounted for variance in math outcomes beyond that explained by magnitude representations within individual notations. The findings also revealed a percentages-are-larger bias, in which percentages are perceived as larger than equivalent fractions and decimals in cross-notation comparisons. There were no differences by grade level, suggesting that such number sense does not necessarily develop with age. Explicitly promoting integrated number sense may help improve mathematics instruction.

Experts organize and generalize knowledge in different ways than novices, and conceptual development is often characterized by a surface-to-structure shift in attention and categorization. We explored a surface-to-structure shift in rational number arithmetic. Children and adults sorted arithmetic equations with fractions and whole numbers in three separate studies. In all studies, children were more likely to sort by number type, conceptualizing fraction problems as distinct from whole number problems. In two studies, adults were more likely to sort equations by operation, suggesting integrated rational number categories. Across studies, some older children and adults sorted into highly differentiated categories. Evidence for a surface-to-structure shift in arithmetic categories suggests changes in knowledge organization in addition to content with increasing expertise.

Research has examined factors underlying the individual differences in delay gratification as childhood delay gratification predicts later life outcomes. Recent studies have focused on group behavior as a critical social factor affecting delay gratification. Here, our three preregistered experiments investigated whether ingroup behaviors encouraged and/or discouraged young children from selecting delayed options in a delay choice gratification test. Experiments 1 and 3 consistently found that 3–6-year-olds were less likely to select delayed choices when they believed that ingroup members selected immediate choices compared to when they had no information on members' behavior. In contrast, their performance on delaying gratification did not differ when they were informed that ingroup members select delayed choices versus when they had no ingroup information. However, these patterns were not observed in Experiment 2, which targeted 5- to 6-year-olds. Furthermore, Experiment 3 found that 3–6-year-olds did not change their evaluation of delay of gratification (e.g., preferred new individuals who delayed), even if ingroup members selected either immediate or delayed choices. Although these findings were supported by weak to moderate evidence with Bayesian analyses, we showed the asymmetric impact of ingroup behaviors on delay gratification in preschoolers. The current study potentially contributes to the understanding of how social factors shape delayed gratification in children.

The study focuses on children in poverty and investigates whether early bilingualism enhances economically disadvantaged children’s Theory of Mind (ToM), and what role Executive Function plays in the relation between bilingualism and ToM. Sixty-eight preschool-aged children (35 English monolinguals, 51.4% boys, and 33 English-Spanish bilingual children, 57.5% boys) from low-income backgrounds completed standardized language assessments, three executive function tasks, and a five-task ToM battery. Results showed that after controlling for children’s age, income-to-needs ratio, and English proficiency, bilingual children demonstrated greater ToM competence compared to monolingual children. A higher degree of bilingualism was associated with better ToM performance in bilingual children. Mediation analyses showed that children’s working memory and attention shifting accounted for the links between bilingualism and ToM. The findings suggest that an early bilingual learning experience may facilitate preschool children’s ToM development in economically disadvantaged environments, and this relation was differentially impacted by executive function components.