Topic
Development research, explained
44 open-access development studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Can a simple movement game predict early school success?
A child's performance on the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task, a movement game measuring behavioral self-regulation, significantly predicts their early academic growth, particularly in mathematics.
- What stigma and unmet needs do Ethiopian caregivers report?
Among 102 Addis Ababa caregivers of children with ID or autism, about 43–45% reported differential treatment or shame, stigma was higher with traditional help-seeking, and 74.5% said educational provision was their biggest unmet need.
- How does aging affect our ability to sense our own body?
As adults age, both their subjective awareness of internal bodily signals and their objective accuracy in detecting their own heartbeat decline.
- What mental skills help nine-year-olds do math?
General skills like visual memory, spatial ability, and executive processing predict mathematical ability in children, whereas a specialized 'number sense' does not.
- Can machine learning better group struggling learners than diagnoses?
Grouping struggling students by cognitive profiles reveals that traditional diagnoses do not match their underlying brain and learning needs.
- Does folic acid after the first trimester help kids’ brains later?
At age 11, children whose mothers continued 400 μg/day folic acid from week 14 scored higher on processing-speed tests and showed stronger MEG language-related Beta/High Gamma responses.
- Can low-cost school games boost executive functions in preschoolers?
A simple, low-cost group game program significantly improved five-year-olds' memory, self-control, and mental flexibility compared to regular preschool activities.
- How motor skills relate to school success in children
Children with better hand-eye coordination performed better on academic tests and tasks requiring visual-spatial skills, while agility showed no such relationship.
- How does executive function relate to early reading in Brazil?
Children rated as poor readers by their teachers show specific difficulties in working memory and mental flexibility, rather than in attention or impulse control.
- Do children with autism use shape to learn new words?
While typically developing toddlers consistently use an object's shape to learn its name, children with autism do not show this bias as a group, though those with larger vocabularies are more likely to do so.
- What affects bonding and child attachment in at-risk families?
Children in families with both demographic and psychological risks have lower attachment security than those facing demographic risks alone.
- How do curiosity and interest help youth remember information?
While being curious helps both children and teenagers remember new facts, teenagers get an extra memory boost when a fact turns out to be unexpectedly interesting.
- Comparing Two Ways to Measure Self-Control in Preschoolers
Direct mental tests and adult behavioral ratings measure different aspects of preschool executive functioning, with ratings better predicting ADHD symptoms and direct tests better predicting reading skills.
- How do babies connect seeing and doing?
Infants who experienced a stronger real-time connection between their own movements and what they saw on screen showed greater brain activation when watching those movements.
- How Preschoolers' Emotions and Thinking Skills Are Linked
Children's everyday emotional expressions in preschool predict their future self-control and thinking skills months later, revealing a close relationship between emotion and cognition.
- Does how children hear speech help predict how they learn to read?
Early speech perception directly predicts future reading ability, but these difficulties are more strongly tied to general language disorders and attention lapses than to dyslexia itself.
- How Children's Brains Process Mistakes and Conflict
As children grow, their brains develop distinct neural signals for detecting mistakes and resolving distractions, which directly relate to their real-world ability to control impulsive behavior.
- How does parenting relate to preschoolers' early reading and maths?
Children whose parents gave well-tuned, less negative help during play had better self-control skills a year later, and those skills in turn went with better early reading and maths.
- Early thinking and motor skills in babies at risk for autism
Babies with a family history of autism show slower development in early thinking skills, such as holding information in mind and self-control, during early childhood.
- Can early motor training help babies at risk for autism?
Infants at high risk for autism showed increased grasping and improved motor skills after using velcro 'sticky mittens' for two weeks.
- Are teenagers more swayed by others' generosity than adults?
Young adolescents were the most likely to shift their real-money charity donations toward what others gave, and unlike adults they followed generous examples as readily as stingy ones.
- Does a daily 'Just Dance' break boost kids' brain power?
A daily 10-minute dance break at school did not improve children's cognitive performance or aerobic fitness over a 9-week period.
- Does Montessori preschool help children more than usual schools?
Children who won a lottery place in public Montessori preschools pulled ahead in academics, social understanding and willingness to tackle hard tasks, and the usual gap between richer and poorer children shrank.
- Adapting cognitive tests for infants in rural Gambia
Infants in rural Gambia scored lower on cognitive tests compared to US norms, with performance dropping progressively throughout early infancy.
- Does experience help babies learn to mimic others?
Infants are more likely to copy the facial expressions and hand movements they have had more practice seeing and performing themselves.
- Do touchscreens help or hurt kids learning new words?
While simple tapping can distract toddlers from learning new words, more complex interactions like dragging objects can actually help older girls and children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds learn better.
- How Handwriting Skills Affect Spelling Across School Grades
While physical handwriting coordination directly limits spelling performance in younger children, it is the underlying retrieval of letter forms, rather than raw motor speed, that continues to influence spelling as children get older.
- How does self-control develop in infants and toddlers?
Different types of self-control develop along independent paths during infancy and do not show stable individual differences between the first and second assessments.
- Do different bilingual environments affect children's attention?
Bilingual children outperform monolinguals in selective attention, but this advantage depends on their language proficiency and their specific sociolinguistic environment.
- How do parents' reading attitudes affect kids' language skills?
Parents' attitudes toward reading do not directly improve their children's language skills, but instead work indirectly by shaping a richer home literacy environment.
- How does working memory develop in primary school children?
Children show rapid working memory improvements between ages 7 and 9 that slow down as they get older, with girls improving faster than boys.
- Do multiple early childhood risks predict later language difficulties?
The total number of early risk factors, rather than how severe they are, is what best predicts language and reading difficulties in early adolescence.
- How coparenting links postpartum depression to toddler behaviors
Supportive coparenting behavior helps protect toddlers from behavioral and sleep issues when mothers experience postpartum depressive symptoms.
- How kids' emotional understanding affects school success
While emotional understanding does not directly improve children's school grades, it helps them build better social skills, which directly lead to higher academic success.
- Cognitive Performance in ADHD and Schizophrenia Over 25 Years
While individuals with early-onset schizophrenia experience an arrest in cognitive development during early adulthood without further decline, those with ADHD show a delayed maturation that eventually catches up to healthy peers.
- Do cultural values influence parenting style and child confidence?
While cultural values influenced parenting styles for South Asian families and child competence for local Chinese families, parenting styles themselves did not directly predict children's self-perceived competence.
- Does bilingualism keep babies open to unfamiliar faces and sounds?
Bilingual infants maintain the ability to distinguish unfamiliar foreign speech sounds but still lose the ability to tell apart unfamiliar other-race faces.
- How does the ability to stop automatic habits develop in kids?
Children's ability to suppress automatic responses improves rapidly as they grow, with performance on a low-memory inhibitory task leveling off in early childhood for accuracy and in later childhood for speed.
- Do kids' social skills develop alongside their physical skills?
A child's ability to understand others' minds is independent of their physical motor skills and mirror neuron-related abilities like imitation.
- Do Quick Resistance Breaks Help Teens Focus and Learn?
Short classroom resistance training breaks can improve adolescents' focused attention and memory, but adding cognitive challenges to the exercises did not provide extra cognitive benefits.
- Do different types of reasoning predict school grades?
Verbal deductive reasoning is a stronger predictor of overall high school grades than visual fluid intelligence.
- Do attachment and mind-reading help kids wait for bigger rewards?
Among 6- to 10-year-olds, children who better understood others' false beliefs, and those with more secure family attachment, were more willing to wait for a bigger reward.
- When can children work out a cause they cannot see?
By age 4, children used the sound a hidden ball made to find it, but only when the sound could plausibly have been caused by the ball, showing they reason about unseen causes rather than just learning associations.
- Does learning to code help kids solve general problems?
Teaching primary school children to code using Scratch and Python significantly improves both their computational thinking and general logical problem-solving abilities.