Developmental Science

Perception of mechanical (i.e. physical) causality, in terms of a cause–effect relationship between two motion events, appears to be a powerful mechanism in our daily experience. In spite of a growing interest in the earliest causal representations, the role of experience in the origin of this sensitivity is still a matter of dispute. Here, we asked the question about the innate origin of causal perception, never tested before at birth.

Do infants, like adults, consider both the probability of falling and the severity of a potential fall when deciding whether to cross a bridge? Crawling and walking infants were encouraged to cross bridges varying in width over a small drop-off. Bridge width affects the probability of falling, whereas drop-off height affects the severity of the potential fall. Crawlers and walkers crossed bridges based only on the probability of falling: They attempted to cross in accordance with bridge width. But infants did not consider the severity of the potential fall: Attempts were identical on the small and large drop-off.

Perception of the ordinal position of a sequence element is critical to many cognitive and motor functions. Here, the prediction that this ability is based on a domain-general perceptual mechanism and, thus, that it emerges prior to the emergence of language was tested. Infants were habituated with sequences of moving/sounding objects and then tested for the ability to perceive the invariant ordinal position of a single element (as depicted in the accompanying figure for Experiment 1) or the invariant relative ordinal position of two adjacent elements (Experiment 2, not shown here).

In two experiments, 2.5-year-old children spontaneously used geometric information from 2D maps to locate objects in a 3D surface layout, without instruction or feedback. Children related maps to their corresponding layouts even though the maps differed from the layouts in size, mobility, orientation, dimensionality, and perspective, and even when they did not depict the target objects directly. Early in development, therefore, children are capable of noting the referential function of strikingly abstract visual representations.

In the primate brain, sensory information is processed along two partially segregated cortical streams: the ventral stream, mainly coding for objects' shape and identity, and the dorsal stream, mainly coding for objects' quantitative information (including size, number, and spatial position). Here we collected, in a large sample of young children and adults, behavioural measures on an extensive set of functions typically associated with either the dorsal or the ventral stream. Results show that during the early stages of development dorsal- and ventral-related functions follow two clearly uncorrelated developmental trajectories, and that, within each stream, some functions show strong correlations: finger gnosis, non-symbolic numerical abilities and spatial abilities within the dorsal stream, and object and face recognition abilities within the ventral stream. This pattern of between stream segregation and within-stream cross-task correlations seems to be lost in adults.

The present longitudinal study tested the roles of early childhood executive control (EC) as well as exposure to poverty-related adversity at family and school levels as key predictors of low-income children's EC in elementary school (n = 391). Findings suggest that children's EC difficulties in preschool and lower family income from early to middle childhood are robust predictors of later EC difficulties as rated by teachers in second and third grades. Findings also suggest enrollment in unsafe elementary schools is significantly predictive of higher levels of teacher-rated EC difficulty, but only for those children who showed initially elevated levels of EC difficulty in early childhood.

Schematic illustration of the main findings of the regression analyses with respect to parental rearing behavior at T1 (left panel) and the brain's feedback processing mechanisms (P300 amplitudes) and risky decision-making during the BART at T2 (right panel). *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001. Age-corrected regression analyses showed that parental rejection at T1 accounted for a unique and significant proportion of the variance in risk-taking during the BART; the more adolescents perceived their parents as rejecting, the more risky decisions were made. Higher levels of perceived emotional warmth predicted increased P300 amplitudes in response to positive feedback at T2. Moreover, these larger P300 amplitudes (gain) significantly predicted risky decision-making during the BART.

Previous studies suggest that individuals with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetically based neurodevelopmental disorder, show specific weaknesses in visual attention and response inhibition within the visuospatial domain. Here we examine the extent to which impairments in attentional control extend to the visuomotor domain using a well-validated measure of choice stepping reaction time (CSRT) in individuals with WS. We examined the interaction between executive control and visually guided stepping using a verbal fluency dual-task or Go/NoGo paradigm during CSRT performance.

Theory of mind (ToM) development, assessed via ‘litmus’ false belief tests, is severely delayed in autism, but the standard testing procedure may underestimate these children's genuine understanding. To explore this, we developed a novel test involving competition to win a reward as the motive for tracking other players’ beliefs (the ‘Dot-Midge task’). Ninety-six children, including 23 with autism (mean age: 10.36 years), 50 typically developing 4-year-olds (mean age: 4.40) and 23 typically developing 3-year-olds (mean age: 3.59) took a standard ‘Sally-Ann’ false belief test, the Dot-Midge task (which was closely matched to the Sally-Ann task procedure) and a norm-referenced verbal ability test. Results showed dramatically better performance on Dot-Midge than Sally-Ann by children with autism.

Much research supports the existence of an Approximate Number System (ANS) that is recruited by infants, children, adults, and non-human animals to generate coarse, non-symbolic representations of number.This system supports simple arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, and ordering of amounts.The current study tests whether an intuition of a morecomplex calculation, division, exists in an indigene group in the Amazon, the Mundurucu, whose language includes no words for large numbers.Mundurucu children were presented with a video event depicting a division transformation of halving, in which pairs of objects turned into single objects, reducing the array's numerical magnitude.

Recent studies indicate that young children preferentially attend to snakes, spiders, and lions compared with nondangerous species, but these results have yet to be replicated in populations that actually experience dangerous animals in nature. This multi-site study investigated the visual-detection biases of southern Indian children towards two potentially dangerous taxa, snakes and lions, that constituted major threats during human evolution. Three- to 8-year-old children from two distinct populations were presented with visual-search tasks containing one target image embedded in matrices of eight distractor images.

The aim of the present work was to examine cultural differences in the development of speed of information processing. Four samples of US children (N = 509) and four samples of East Asian children (N = 661) completed psychometric measures of processing speed on two occasions. Analyses of the longitudinal data indicated that, although processing speed was comparable among US and East Asian children at the youngest age (~4.5 years), it developed more rapidly in some but not all of the East Asian samples.