Developmental Science

We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment to test whether educational activities inspired by sustainability motive-alignment theory can boost the effectiveness of real-world environmental education. Motive-alignment interventions aim to encourage behavior change by linking new behaviors with goals that are salient to a target group (e.g., for youth, experiencing autonomy, gainin…

Rhythm is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour, and musical rhythm provides one of its most elaborate instances. Unlike speech, this rhythmic behaviour is characterized by the production of temporal patterns structured around small-integer ratios, which emerge early in life and change systematically across development. Whether such developmental trajectories are uniquely human or reflect broad…

Although prior research has linked social distance to defending in school-aged children and adolescents, it remains unclear whether this effect extends to preschool-aged children, generalizes to both defending behaviors and intentions, or demonstrates heterogeneity in this younger population. This study addressed these gaps by focusing on preschoolers, distinguishing between defending behaviors a…

Gossip plays an important role in children's social interactions and judgments, yet its content is not always accurate or reliable. The present study examined how children change their evaluations when firsthand observations conflict with gossip. A total of 192 children aged four to six years participated in two experiments. Study 1 investigated the effects of age and gossip valence. Results show…

While repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping are associated with autism, non-autistic toddlers also exhibit this behavior (e.g., when excited), making clinically meaningful differences difficult to discern prior to age 2. Computer vision, a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI), has the potential to capture subtle movement differences that may otherwise be overlooked. We examined whether m…

Early in development, children can infer latent structure in the world from sparse and ambiguous evidence. Through a process known as structure learning, they extract statistical regularities, construct causal models from those regularities, and use those models to arbitrate between exploiting known options and exploring novel alternatives. In turn, each decision and its outcomes refine the model…

This longitudinal study examined the developmental relations between first-order Theory of Mind (ToM), advanced ToM, and executive function (EF) from ages 4 to 7.5. Two-hundred-three German children were assessed at ages 4, 5.5, and 7.5 on measures of ToM, EF (working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility), general cognition, and language. Using regression, structural equation modeling (SEM),…

Vocabulary knowledge is foundational to educational success, but significant gaps exist between students with reading disabilities or those from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers. These gaps have cascading effects, as children with lower vocabulary knowledge are less likely to acquire new words through independent reading and are less responsive to vocabulary instruction methods like read…

Humans routinely share valuable resources, even at significant personal cost (e.g., organ donation). What motivates such generosity? This study examined the emotional benefits of sharing in toddlers with the largest and youngest sample to date (N = 134; M_age = 20.50 months, range = 16.57-23.77 months). Replicating prior studies, toddlers displayed greater happiness after giving than re…

Canonical babbling, or the production of adult-like consonant-vowel syllables in infancy, represents a critical milestone in prelinguistic vocal development and predicts later speech and language outcomes. This systematic review and meta-analysis synthesized findings from 42 studies and 1277 infants aged 5-24 months across 16 language environments to examine how methodological and contextual fact…

Lying about achievements is commonplace in reputation management, yet its social consequences may depend on cultural conventions. The present research examined how Chinese children aged 5-11 years (N = 173, 48% girls, M_age: 8.40 years) and adults (N = 98, 52% women, M_age: 20.76 years) evaluated truth-tellers and lie-tellers who described their achievements in ways that eithe…

Although control over learning is known to enhance memory, its developmental effects have been inconsistently reported, possibly due to differences in the level and type of control examined. To clarify this, the present study tested how three forms of control-high consequential control allowing regulation of study order, frequency, and duration (Experiment 1), partial consequential control allowi…

We investigated developmental differences in the attention strategies children use in their emotion reasoning across middle childhood. Specifically, we examined whether, with age, children become less likely to distribute their attention broadly when reasoning about emotions, and more likely to come to attend selectively to the most reliable cues. To test this hypothesis, N = 180 five- through te…

Children with developmental dyslexia (DD) exhibit deficits in auditory temporal processing, potentially linking to their difficulties in reading. Previous studies in alphabetic languages have reported atypical neural synchronization to low-frequency rhythms. For non-alphabetic languages like Chinese, however, the specific frequency bands involved and the cognitive mechanisms through which such ab…

Children demonstrate remarkably different temporal characteristics, as well as higher interindividual variability, in the cortical auditory responses as compared with adults. The detailed dynamics at the level of underlying current generators are, however, not established. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to explore the age-related differences in the cortical currents probed by simple auditor…

The capacity to deceive is a hallmark of cognitive sophistication. Researchers often use games requiring deception to study the development of this capacity, assuming such games effectively isolate the cognitive aspects from sociomoral considerations. In three studies we challenge this assumption by explicitly giving 36- to 83-month-old Singaporean children (N = 279) permission to deceive in such…

Advancing generalizability, replicability, and public trust in developmental science requires testing theories across diverse contexts and disseminating findings widely. Yet researchers based outside the USA or studying non-USA samples (non-USA based researchers) often face obstacles during peer-review in mainstream psychology journals. Moreover, USA-based research on developmental science benefi…

Developmental psychologists are increasingly leveraging mobile and wearable sensors paired with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically detect the everyday behaviors and interactions theorized to drive development. These technologies provide an opportunity to capture learners' real-world experiences, with wide-ranging implications for basic science and intervention. How…

On average, cultures seem to shift towards a greater emphasis of an independent social orientation. However, this shift may vary, with some cultures following different trajectories. Cultural transformations also affect the norms regarding the qualities favored in children, known as socialization goals. Research suggests that a greater shift towards independence may have more negative consequence…