Cognitive Developmental Research Research Articles

Decolonizing and Diversifying Research in Cognitive Development

ABSTRACT This article serves as an introduction to the Special Issue on “Decolonizing and Diversifying Research in Cognitive Development.” The Special Issue comprises six articles: two articles are empirical articles that focus on executive function development in under-represented environments, two articles address barriers pathways toward behavioral change in advancing toward diversification and decolonization; and two articles focus on reconciling sampling and reporting practices with the scientific goal of generalizability. Though different lenses, each article identifies important practices and considerations for broadening the study of cognitive development to faithfully represent children’s diverse environments and trajectories via developing methods and practices in situ and sampling judiciously across diverse settings. The series culminates in a commentary via Bard and Keller, who discuss each article and articulate future pathways toward decolonization and diversification.

Neurodevelopment of Attention, Learning, and Memory Systems in Infancy

Understanding how we come to make sense of our environments requires understanding both how we take in new information and how we flexibly process and store that information in memory for subsequent retrieval. In other words, infant cognitive development research is best served by studies that probe infant attention as well as infant learning and memory development. In this article, we first review what is known about infant attention and what is known about a selection of learning systems available in infancy. Then, we review what is known about the interactions between attention and these systems, focusing on infancy when possible but highlighting relevant child and adult literatures when infant research is yet scarce. Finally, we close by proposing a path forward, which we believe will result in a clearer understanding of the interactions between attention and memory that govern infant learning.

Domain-specific knowledge and domain-general abilities in children's science problem-solving.

Problem-solving in early and middle childhood is of high relevance for cognitive developmental research and educational support. Previous research on science problem-solving has focussed on the process and strategies of children handling challenging tasks, but less on providing insights into the cognitive network that enables science problem-solving. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether performance in science problem-solving is mainly determined by domain-specific rule knowledge, by domain-general cognitive abilities or both. In our study, 215 6- to 8-year-old children completed a set of three domain-specific rule knowledge tasks and three corresponding problem-solving tasks that were content-coherent, as well as a vocabulary task, and a reasoning task. Correlational and regression analyses revealed a negligible impact of domain-specific rule knowledge on corresponding problem-solving tasks. In contrast, the associations between problem-solving performance in different domains and the associations between problem-solving performance and domain-general abilities (vocabulary and reasoning) were comparably strong. The findings suggest that science problem-solving in primary school children primarily relies on domain-general cognitive abilities. Implications of these findings are discussed with regard to cognitive theories and early science education.

The successful use of a search strategy improves with visuospatial working memory in 2- to 4.5-year-olds

Using spatial cues such as shape, orientation, and pattern aids visuospatial working memory because it allows strategies that reduce the load on this cognitive resource. One such strategy, namely taking advantage of patterned spatial distributions, remains understudied to date. This strategy demands keeping track of already-searched locations and excluding them from further search and so correlates with visuospatial working memory. The use of such strategies should, in principle, develop in early childhood, but because most studies focus on chunking, the development of other strategies reducing the load on working memory is understudied in young children. Therefore, in this study we tested whether children aged 2 to 4.5 years (N = 97) could take advantage of spatial cues in their search and whether this ability correlated with their age, verbal ability, and visuospatial working memory. The results showed that the ability to use a patterned spatial distribution (searching a row of locations from one side to the other instead of a random search) significantly improved with visuospatial working memory but not with age or verbal ability. These results suggest that visuospatial abilities may rapidly develop from 2 to 4.5 years of age, and given their impact on later mathematic achievement, demand increased attention in cognitive developmental research and early childhood education.

Visual reflexive attention as a useful measure of development.

Cognitive psychology began over three-quarters of a century ago and we have learned a great deal in that time, including concerning the development of cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, and memory, all of which develop across infancy and childhood. Attention is one aspect of cognition that is vital to success in a variety of life activities and, arguably, the foundation of memory, learning, problem solving, decision making, and other cognitive activities. The cognitive abilities of later childhood and adulthood generally appear to depend on the reflexes, abilities, and skills of infancy. Research in developmental cognitive science can help us understand adult cognition and know when to intervene when cognitive function is at risk. This area of research can be challenging because, even in typical development, the course of cognitive development for a particular child does not always improve monotonically. In addition, the typical trajectory of this development has been understood differently from different historical perspectives. Neither the history of thought that has led to our current understanding of attention (including its various types) nor the importance of developmental aspects of attention are frequently covered in training early career researchers, especially those whose primary area of research in not attention. My goal is to provide a review that will be useful especially to those new to research in the subfield of attention. Sustained attention in adults and children has been well-studied, but a review of the history of thought on the development of reflexive attention with a focus on infancy is overdue. Therefore, I draw primarily on historical and modern literature and clarify confusing terminology as it has been used over time. I conclude with examples of how cognitive development research can contribute to scientific and applied progress.

Children’s Essentialist Beliefs About Weight

ABSTRACT Striking weight biases emerge early in development, yet cognitive-developmental research has largely ignored weight as a social characteristic of interest. How do children conceive of weight? In particular, do children hold essentialist views of weight (i.e. do they view weight as natural, stable, inductively meaningful, and reflective of people’s insides) as they do of so many other social characteristics? We conducted an exploratory investigation of children’s weight essentialism across two studies. In total, 356 participants (280 4- to 11-year-old children and 76 adults from the United States, mostly White and from middle- to high-income families) participated in three tasks, respectively assessing three dimensions of essentialism of social categories: Beliefs about weight stability, heritability, and inductive potential despite transformation. Results revealed that children viewed weight as stable (similarly so to race) and informative of someone’s food choices, but they did not view it as biologically- or genetically-determined. Thus, children may not view weight as reflecting people’s biological nature (biological essentialism), but they may view weight as reflecting people’s stable personal character (moral essentialism) – a view which is also highly compatible with weight bias, unlike biological essentialism. Children also demonstrated stronger essentialist views of lightness than heaviness across tasks, though essentialism of heaviness increased over development. Findings are discussed as they relate to early conceptions of weight and weight bias. Implications for conceptualizations and measurement of essentialism are also discussed.

Does the public know what researchers know? Perceived task difficulty impacts adults' intuitions about children's early word learning.

The present study examined adults' understanding of children's early word learning. Undergraduates, non-parents, parents, and Speech-Language Pathologists (N = 535, 74% female, 56% White) completed a survey with 11 word learning principles from the perspective of a preschooler. Questions tested key principles from early word learning research. For each question, participants were prompted to select an answer based on the perspective of a preschooler. Adults demonstrated aligned intuitions for all principles except those derived from domain-general theories, regardless of experience with language development (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 revealed that perceived difficulty of a task for a preschooler impacted adults' reasoning about word learning processes. Experiment 3 ruled out level of confidence and interest as mechanisms to explain the results. These results highlight disconnects in knowledge between the cognitive development research community and the general public. Therefore, efforts must be made to communicate scientific findings to the broader non-academic community, emphasizing children's ability to excel at word learning in the face of task difficulty.

The Role of Partnerships to Shift Power Asymmetries in Research with Vulnerable Communities: Reflections from an Early Childhood Development Project in South Africa

ABSTRACT The majority of the world’s children live in low- and middle-income countries, yet the majority of early childhood cognitive research is done with a small proportion of high-income countries. These findings cannot be assumed to apply across all contexts. It is therefore necessary to confront entrenched systems of power and privilege in early childhood cognitive development research as they relate to researchers and vulnerable communities. South Africa (SA) is a previously colonized, Majority World country with a history of white supremacy and racial segregation. Although early cognitive development is a growing field of research in SA, power and privilege in this field of research are yet to be properly considered. Within SA’s unique context, we highlight the valuable role of partnerships in shifting power asymmetries; in our case, between early cognitive development researchers and a community-based organization with a 50-year history of working in vulnerable communities to promote young children’s development. Our work together thus far has largely focused on executive function and numeracy skills (inspired by Minority World country research) in vulnerable SA children. We reflect on the authors’ positionality, the intersectionality of privilege where relevant, and discuss three themes: the assessment of young children’s development in vulnerable SA settings; formation of a more equitable partnership with individuals and communities whose voices are not often heard in this research; and translation and dissemination of research findings. We include recommendations for researchers to help with decolonizing early cognitive development research in order to add value to research from diverse settings.

Mixed-Effects Models for Cognitive Development Researchers

ABSTRACT Mixed-effects models are an analytic technique for modeling repeated measurement or nested data. This paper explains the logic of mixed-effects modeling and describes two examples of mixed-effects analyses using R. The intended audience of the paper is psychologists who specialize in cognitive development research. Therefore, the concepts and examples covered will focus primarily on repeated-measurement data resulting from studies in which participants respond to multiple items or trials. However, many of the concepts and examples we cover will likely be of use to readers outside this area of psychology. Finally, we discuss recommendations for dealing with practical challenges, suggest approaches for troubleshooting, and provide guidance on reporting results from mixed-effects models.

Great ape enculturation studies: a neglected resource in cognitive development research

Disagreement remains about whether particular human socio-cognitive traits arose primarily as a result of biological adaptations, or because of changing cultural practices. Heyes argues that uniquely human traits, including imitation and theory of mind, are the product of cultural learning. In contrast, Tomasello argues that they are, in key respects, part of a suite of adaptations for ‘shared intentionality’. We consider how such disagreements might be resolved. We show that the kinds of consideration often used to adjudicate questions about trait origins are insufficient to settle origin questions. Furthermore, humankind’s immersion in culture undermines the prospect that cross-cultural and developmental studies could resolve origin questions. Nonetheless we argue that, when cautiously interpreted, currently neglected studies of enculturated great apes (i.e. apes raised in human environments) can shed new light on trait origins, and inform mechanistic accounts of cognitive development. While acknowledging the shortcomings of enculturation research, we argue that it deserves renewed attention.

Understanding preferences in infancy.

A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Development and Aging.

Structure in cognitive developmental research:

Structure in cognitive developmental research:

Children's use of pragmatic inference to learn about the social world.

Young children often endorse stereotypes-such as "girls are bad at math." We explore one mechanism through which these beliefs may be transmitted: via pragmatic inference. Specifically, we ask whether preschoolers and adults can learn about an unmentioned social group from what is said about another group, and if this inferential process is sensitive to the context of the utterance. Sixty-three- to five-year-old children and fifty-five adults were introduced to two novel social groups-Stripeys and Dotties-and witnessed a speaker praising abilities of one group (e.g., "the Stripeys are good at building chairs"). To examine the effect of context, we compared situations where the speaker was knowledgeable about the abilities of both groups, and had been queried about the performance of both groups (broad context), versus situations where the speaker was only knowledgeable about one group and was only asked about that group (narrow context). Both preschoolers and adults were sensitive to context: they were more likely to infer that the group not mentioned by the speaker was relatively unskilled, and were more confident about it, in the broad context condition. Our work integrates research in language development and social cognitive development and demonstrates that even young children can "read between the lines," utilizing subtle contextual cues to pick up negative evaluative messages about social groups even from statements that ostensibly do not mention them at all. HIGHLIGHTS: After hearing a speaker praise one group's skill, preschoolers and adults infer that an unmentioned group is relatively less skilled across a range of measures. These inferences are context-sensitive and are stronger when the speaker is knowledgeable of and asked about both groups' skill level. These results shed light on how children may indirectly learn negative stereotypes, especially ones that adults are unlikely to state explicitly. This work extends previous research on children's developing pragmatic ability, as well as their ability to learn about the social world from language.

The Science of Children’s Religious and Spiritual Development

The Science of Children’s Religious and Spiritual Development

Reliable developmental research: Not only for infancy

AbstractReliability in developmental research is important to consider not only for infant research but also for researchers who wish to study individual differences at all ages. Forced‐choice behavioural tasks are popular in cognitive developmental research with preschoolers and young school‐age children because of their ease of administration and interpretation; however, the fact that guessing correctly is possible introduces noise that reduces reliability. An informal simulation is presented to illustrate this issue. Researchers wishing to investigate individual differences are encouraged to consider the reliability of the tasks they choose and not reflexively rely on familiar tasks that may be poorly suited to the study of true individual differences.

The development of children’s prospective memory: Lessons for developmental science

AbstractThe study of children’s prospective memory has gained new momentum over the past 20 years and is now an active area of research in cognitive development. Yet, this resurgence has been accompanied by significant challenges that offer important lessons and insights for other areas of developmental science. In this article, I provide an overview and theoretical accounts of the development of children’s prospective memory. I then describe three puzzling findings that remain unresolved in children’s development of this kind of memory: (1) the contradictory effects of delay length on prospective memory performance, (2) why reminders sometimes fail to improve prospective memory performance, and (3) why parent reports and behavioral measures of prospective memory might fail to correlate. I discuss how each challenge can be applied broadly to other areas of children’s development. I conclude by highlighting challenges and opportunities as the field moves forward.

Developing, mature, and unique functions of the child’s brain in reading and mathematics

Cognitive development research shows that children use basic “child-unique” strategies for reading and mathematics. This suggests that children’s neural processes will differ qualitatively from those of adults during this developmental period. The goals of the current study were to 1) establish whether a within-subjects neural dissociation between reading and mathematics exists in early childhood as it does in adulthood, and 2) use a novel, developmental intersubject correlation method to test for “child-unique”, developing, and adult-like patterns of neural activation within those networks. Across multiple tasks, children’s reading and mathematics activity converged in prefrontal cortex, but dissociated in temporal and parietal cortices, showing similarities to the adult pattern of dissociation. “Child-unique” patterns of neural activity were observed in multiple regions, including the anterior temporal lobe and inferior frontal gyri, and showed “child-unique” profiles of functional connectivity to prefrontal cortex. This provides a new demonstration that “children are not just little adults” – the developing brain is not only quantitatively different from adults, it is also qualitatively different.

Rapid, experience-related changes in the organization of children’s semantic knowledge

The organization of knowledge according to relations between concepts is crucially important for many cognitive processes, and its emergence during childhood is a key focus of cognitive development research. Prior evidence about the role of learning and experience in the development of knowledge organization primarily comes from studies investigating differences between preexisting, naturally occurring groups (e.g., children from rural vs. urban settings, children who own a pet vs. children who do not) and a handful of studies on the effects of researcher-developed educational interventions. However, we know little about whether knowledge organization can be relatively rapidly molded by shorter-term real-world learning experiences (e.g., on a timescale of days vs. years or months). The current study investigated whether naturalistic learning experiences can drive rapid measurable changes in knowledge organization in children by investigating the effects of a week-long zoo summer camp (compared with a control school-based camp) on the degree to which 4- to 9-year-old children’s knowledge about animals was organized according to taxonomic relations. Although there were no differences in taxonomic organization between the zoo camp and the school-based camp at pretest, only children who participated in the zoo camp showed increases in taxonomic organization at posttest. Moreover, analyses of changes in taxonomic organization in zoo camp children suggested that these changes were primarily driven by improvements in the degree to which children differentiated between taxonomic categories. These findings provide novel evidence that naturalistic experiences can drive rapid changes in knowledge organization.

An Introduction to the Approximate Number System.

What are young children's first intuitions about numbers and what role do these play in their later understanding of mathematics? Traditionally, number has been viewed as a culturally derived breakthrough occurring relatively recently in human history that requires years of education to master. Contrary to this view, research in cognitive development indicates that our minds come equipped with a rich and flexible sense of number-the Approximate Number System (ANS). Recently, several major challenges have been mounted to the existence of the ANS and its value as a domain-specific system for representing number. In this article, we review five questions related to the ANS (what, who, why, where, and how) to argue that the ANS is defined by key behavioral and neural signatures, operates independently from nonnumeric dimensions such as time and space, and is used for a variety of functions (including formal mathematics) throughout life. We identify research questions that help elucidate the nature of the ANS and the role it plays in shaping children's earliest understanding of the world around them.

A Metatheory for Cognitive Development (or "Piaget is Dead" Revisited).

In 1997, I argued that with the loss of Piaget's theory as an overarching guide, cognitive development had become disjointed and a new metatheory was needed to unify the field. I suggested developmental biology, particularly evolutionary theory, as a candidate. Here, I examine the increasing emphasis of biology in cognitive development research over the past 2 decades. I describe briefly the emergence of evolutionary developmental psychology and examine areas in which proximal and distal biological causation have been particularly influential. I argue that developmental biology will continue to increasingly influence research and theory in cognitive development and that evolutionary theory is well on its way to becoming a metatheory, not just for cognitive development, but for developmental psychology generally.