Productive memory processes, wherein learners move beyond directly taught information to generate new knowledge, are considered a means to knowledge base expansion. One such productive process is self-derivation through memory integration, which has been shown to relate concurrently to both children's and adults' performance on tests of semantic knowledge. Yet the extent to which self-derivation is a means of support for accumulation of new knowledge over time is not yet known. In the current study, to address this question, we examined longitudinal relations between self-derivation and knowledge in a sample of 148 8- to 12-year-old children (51 % female, 65 % White, 7 % Hispanic descent) in the Southeastern United States. To do so, we provided tests of self-derivation, memory for directly taught facts, and knowledge at two waves of data collection, approximately 1 year apart. We found significant relations between self-derivation and measures of knowledge across 1 year's time, while accounting for age and memory for directly taught information. This research provides novel insight to the cognitive mechanisms that underlie successful semantic knowledge base expansion.

Adults are adept at metacognitively monitoring their memory accuracy-both explicitly and implicitly-and at using metacognitive control to maintain high memory accuracy. However, the development of monitoring and control is less well understood. We administered an episodic cued recall task with children aged five to 11 years (N = 106). Participants watched two video clips of everyday episodic events before answering cued recall memory questions. For each memory question, participants provided a confidence rating (explicit monitoring), sorted their answer into show/hide boxes (control), and chose to volunteer/withhold their response (control). Multiple behavioural gestures of cognitive effort (implicit monitoring; e.g., looking to carer, non-word fillers) were recorded and later coded by blind raters. Children were less accurate and less able to assign confidence to reflect their memory accuracy when they were forced to generate a response after previously saying "I don't know". But on volunteered trials, explicit, implicit monitoring and control measures predicted memory accuracy. There were age-related improvements in explicit monitoring for predicting memory accuracy, but there were no age differences in implicit monitoring or control processes. We found evidence for both a direct and an indirect link between confidence and memory accuracy. Our findings suggest that explicit and implicit monitoring have different developmental trajectories in cued recall and that children can be adaptive to control their memory accuracy to a similar extent from early- to mid-childhood.

Gender gaps in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) emerge as early as elementary school, highlighting the need for early interventions. Recent work suggests that a pretend play intervention, in which girls roleplayed as a hardworking scientist increased their persistence in a novel science activity. However, instead of highlighting scientists' hard work, the pervasive cultural narrative portrays scientists as brilliant, a trait that girls associate less with their own gender than boys. The present study investigates whether pretending to be a brilliant scientist can also boost girls' persistence. Experiment 1 tested a large and diverse sample of four- to seven-year-olds (N = 325, 164 girls, 55% White). Children played a science game in one of three conditions: as themselves (no-roleplay condition), as a hardworking scientist (dedication condition), or as a brilliant scientist (brilliance condition). Results showed that children in both the dedication and brilliance conditions persisted longer in the science activity than those in the no-roleplay condition. This effect was mainly driven by girls. Thus, pretend play of science role models enhances children's science engagement, regardless of the role models' characteristics. Experiment 2 (N = 160, 82 girls, 50% White) revealed that roleplaying as an artist did not yield the same effect, suggesting that pretending to be scientists, not pretend play in general, increased children's persistence in science activities. These findings have broad implications for ways to mitigate the gender gap in science. We discuss possible mechanisms driving the role of pretend play in boosting children's science engagement.

Children readily infer the presence of social groups based on shared characteristics. Theorizing and research in developmental psychology suggest that social categorization and inference processes may be influenced by linguistic cues or labels used to describe behaviors or groups. For example, Gelman and Heyman (1999) found that children attributed greater stability to behaviors if described with nouns rather than verbs. However, there is only limited developmental research on how linguistic cues affect group attitude formation. We present three studies examining how linguistics cues influence evaluation of novel groups, focusing on the distinction between noun and adjective labels. We introduced children to two groups via a storybook paradigm depicting desirable or undesirable behaviors (N = 365; median age = 7 years). While children acquired evaluative group representations, contrary to our hypotheses, linguistic variations did not significantly impact attitude formation. Children expressed group differences primarily through positive evaluations and did not generalize these group evaluations to unfamiliar group members, instead tending to evaluate them mildly positively.

Beginning in infancy, laughter promotes positive social interactions. However, laughter can also convey derision. Adults distinguish friendly from derisory laughter, appropriately modulating social behavior based on their perceptions of the laugher's intent. Given the connection between laughter perception and broader social functioning, it is important to understand how this skill develops in young children who are initiating foundational early social bonds. Moreover, children who have difficulties forming and maintaining social bonds-including those with callous-unemotional (CU) traits-may show differences in correctly identifying and responding to laughter. Here, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N = 150; 50% female) categorized laughter clips that varied in conveying affiliation (i.e., friendly) or dominance (i.e., mean) and reported on whether they wanted to play with the person producing the laughter. Children distinguished between laughter types, were accurate at detecting mean laughter, and showed increasing accuracy across ages 3 to 5 years. Children expressed a preference to play with friendly versus mean laughers, a distinction that sharpened from ages 3 to 5 years. Higher CU traits predicted lower accuracy for identifying mean laughs, with no CU-related difference for friendly laughs, though CU traits were not related to social preference. The findings provide the first evidence of young children's ability to detect and appropriately adjust their behavioral intentions based on different communicative signals conveyed in laughter. Findings also suggest that these abilities may be relevant to young children who have difficulties with interpersonal interactions and social bonding.

Numbers and space are associated in the human brain. One of the most-studied spatial-numerical associations (SNAs) is the SNARC effect (Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes), for which robust group-level effects are reported across adult studies. Despite well-replicated group-level effects, recent individual-level analysis in adults indicate that only a minority of individuals consistently map numbers onto space (Cipora et al., 2019). To date, SNARC studies in children remain generally scarce with inconclusive results. And none have explored the consistency of individual effects at earlier developmental stages. In the present study, we therefore tested 135 kindergarten children performing magnitude judgments to assess not only group-level SNARC effects but also the prevalence of individual consistency using the same methodology recently applied in adults (Cipora et al., 2019). Our findings reveal a significant magnitude SNARC effect at the group-level. However, similarly to adults, only 37% of the children consistently associated numbers with space in a left-to-right direction when considering CIs around observed effects. While these findings suggest that SNAs on average emerge earlier in life, they also point towards considerable heterogeneity across individuals in that respect. How this can help us understand the conflicting results in the literature regarding significant group-level SNARC effects in children, and guide future research on the potential relation between individual SNARC effects and educational measures in math will be discussed.

Preschoolers often imitate actions that are causally irrelevant, a phenomenon called "overimitation (OI)". The present study examines how task context and language framing influence OI. A total of 160 four- to five-year-old German children from predominantly middle- to high-socioeconomic backgrounds participated in the study. All children performed the same OI task under four different conditions. They observed an adult model who demonstrated functional and non-functional actions before they themselves were allowed to retrieve a cookie from a transparent jar which could easily be opened by unscrewing the lid. This task was conducted either in a laboratory setting with an unfamiliar experimenter as model or at each child's home with their caregiver as model. In both contexts, either a normative or a non-normative verbal instruction was used, resulting in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. OI scores were not significantly affected by framing or context alone. However, a significant interaction was found between the two factors: a normative language led to more OI in the lab-context, but did not affect OI-scores in the home context. Implications of these findings for children's sensitivity to context conditions and language framing in observational learning are discussed.

There is preliminary evidence that children of parents with depression exhibit alterations in reward processing that may increase children's risk for developing psychopathology. However, depression is a heterogeneous disorder, and it is unclear whether specific symptoms of parental depression may be particularly associated with increased risk in children. The current study examined links between parents' anhedonic versus non-anhedonic symptoms of depression and neural indices of reward outcome processing in children. Participants in this study were a community sample of 217 parent-child dyads (children ages 7-11; 53.00% male, 65.90% non-Hispanic White). Children's reward outcome processing was assessed during a simple guessing task with the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential (ERP), which indexes initial neural responsiveness to positive and negative outcome feedback (e.g., winning or losing money). Higher levels of parental anhedonic, but not non-anhedonic, depressive symptoms were associated with more blunted reactivity to both positive and negative outcome feedback in children. The finding was maintained when statistically controlling for children's own levels of depression and positive affect. These results suggest that parental anhedonia may be a core feature of depression uniquely related to alterations in children's reward processing, which may have important implications for interventions designed to reduce risk in youth.

States with a focus on oneself, such as observing oneself (private self-focus) and being observed by others (public self-focus), are proposed to increase the saliency of own motives and evaluations by others and thereby to influence behavior. These processes become particularly relevant toward the end of early childhood, around the same age when children's moral self-concept (their view of themselves as prosocial agents) consolidates. This study advances the understanding of the role of self-focus on children's prosocial behavior by considering their moral self-concept. We investigated how private self-focus and two facets of public self-focus affect sharing behavior, the moral self-concept, and their interrelation. In a preregistered study, we assessed 5- to 8-year-olds' (N = 161, 84 female) sharing behavior and moral self-concept across four conditions. Children shared while observing themselves (private self-focus), while being observed by another child (reputation), while being observed by another child who could reciprocate later (reciprocity), or while not being observed (control). Generally, children shared more when observed by another person compared to when they were not in the focus of anybody, whereas observing themselves did not increase sharing. Children's moral self-concept was positively correlated with sharing, particularly when being in public self-focus, while mean values did not differ between conditions. The study provides novel evidence for the specific role of the awareness of others' evaluation in children's prosocial behavior. It suggests a social grounding of the moral self-concept by revealing its particular role for sharing behavior when being in the focus of social attention.

Three-year-old children normatively protest the transgression of adult rules in a variety of contexts. Five-year-olds also normatively protest the transgression of rules they have themselves created collaboratively with peers. But do children of these ages protest rules that they have created for themselves as individuals? We prompted five-year-olds (Study 1: 128 participants, 69 females) and three-year-olds (Study 2: 64 participants, 32 females) to devise a way to play with a toy in the presence of some puppet peers, after which a new puppet engaged with the toy the 'wrong' way. Results showed that five-year-olds protested at similar rates regardless of whether they came up with a way to play collaboratively with others and then played together (collaborative condition), came up with a way to play individually but then played together (two trendsetter conditions), or came up with a way to play and played totally individually (solo condition). In Study 2, three-year-olds protested self-created rules as well, albeit at lower rates than five-year-olds. Finally, neither age group's protest seemed to be influenced by instructions containing explicit cues of normativity or conventionality (e.g., creating a game with rules vs coming up with a way to play). As such, when children create norms themselves, their willingness to protest novice transgressors seems not to be impacted by the degree to which these norms were created through collaboration. Moreover, our results show that promiscuous normativity of self-created norms emerges earlier than previously thought, around the same time children become promiscuous normativists towards adult-created norms.

The present study systematically investigated how 83 (42 female, Austrian, 41 to 79 months) children reasoned on Call and Tomasello's (1999) nonverbal false belief task. Experiment 1 replicated the central finding that children realized that a mistaken communicator tended to mark the wrong, unbaited box. However, we found that less than half of the children gave consistently correct responses while others responded in a way indistinguishable from random guessing. Some children noted that markings were consistently wrong, suggesting a simple response strategy of choosing the unmarked box without reasoning about the communicator's false belief. Experiment 2 undermined this potential strategy by adding correctly marked trials. Performance dropped so that it could not be distinguished anymore from random responding. These results call into question whether Call and Tomasello's task detects reasoning about false beliefs.

Understanding developmental trajectories in fairness decision-making provides critical insights into the foundational role of fairness norms in human societies. This study investigates how different choice contexts shape children's preferred approach and the costs incurred on fairness decisions. We examined third-party punishment (TPP) and third-party compensation (TPC) behaviors among children aged 10-12 years across two choice contexts: the single-choice context requiring the selection of either punishment or compensation (N = 243) and the dual-choice context allowing the use of both (N = 236). Participants responded to three types of offers: high inequality, moderate inequality, and equality. Key findings revealed that (1) Children predominantly chose "compensate only" in the single-choice context but preferred "punish and compensate" in the dual-choice context, and (2) Children incurred more costs to uphold fairness in the dual-choice context, with developmental differences observed across age groups. These results highlight how choice context influences fairness decision-making, deepen our understanding of developmental changes in TPP and TPC, and offer implications for how educators and policymakers can support children in proactively safeguarding fairness as bystanders.

Children's interest and motivation in math and science decline dramatically beginning as early as elementary school (K-5). This is especially true for marginalized students, such as girls and children from underrepresented racial-ethnic minority (URM) backgrounds. Understanding the relation between children's STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) competence beliefs and STEM occupation expectations provides a basis for timely and targeted intervention. This association is crucial because expectations about who will pursue and engage in STEM occupations reveals potential biases that might translate into exclusion of participation from STEM-related activities in childhood. To examine this topic, a survey was administered to N = 842 children ages 7-12 years from different racial-ethnic backgrounds in the suburbs of a large Mid-Atlantic city. As hypothesized, we found that math and science competence beliefs about girls predicted children's expectation that a girl, rather than a boy, would grow up to be a scientist and a doctor. Further, math and science competency beliefs about URM peers predicted children's expectation that a Black or Latine child would grow up to be a doctor, though these beliefs were not related to their expectations that a Black or Latine child would grow up to be a scientist. Additionally, participants were more likely to expect a girl to grow up to be a doctor than to be a scientist. The effects of participant age, gender, and race were also investigated. These findings contribute to understanding how best to broaden participation in math and science fields for all children.

Ordinal knowledge plays a foundational role in early mathematics, yet little is known about how different forms of ordinal representation support preschoolers' arithmetic. The present study investigated whether two types of count-list-based ordinal representations-rote counting and number ordering-mediate the relationship between symbolic cardinal knowledge and arithmetic performance in preschool children. Sixty-four preschool children (mean age = 67.3 months) completed a battery of tasks assessing cardinality, rote counting, number ordering, and arithmetic. Mediation analyses revealed that both rote counting and number ordering fully mediated the relationship between symbolic number comparison and arithmetic performance. Importantly, analyses showed that these mediators differentially supported arithmetic depending on problem complexity: rote counting was more strongly associated with simpler addition problems, while flexible number ordering predicted performance on more complex addition problems typically solved with overt counting strategies. These findings highlight the heterogeneous nature of ordinal representations and underscore their role as early supports for arithmetic, even before elementary school. Implications for understanding early ordinal representations and its use on education practices are discussed.

Currently, there is a heated debate regarding the cognitive processes involved in solving single-digit addition problems and their inherent problem-size effect. The problem-size effect corresponds to an increase in the solution times as the size of the operands increases, and two theoretical accounts (memory retrieval and automatized counting) have been proposed to explain this effect. In the present study, we investigated the developmental changes behind the problem-size effect to pit these accounts against each other. To do so, 61 first-grade and sixth-grade children solved single-digit addition problems (with operands ranging from 0 to 9), and we scrutinized the problem-size effect within both tie and non-tie problems. We observed that tie problems presented a problem-size effect in first-grade children and this effect disappeared by the sixth grade. This is consistent with recent observations showing a developmental shift from counting to direct memory retrieval for small tie problems (Bagnoud et al., 2021), and we extend these findings by showing that this shift occurs at different speed for large ties. In contrast, non-tie problems always presented a problem-size effect in the first-grade children and critically in the sixth-grade children. This is inconsistent with the automatized counting theory (Uittenhove et al., 2016), which proposes different cognitive mechanisms for very-small and medium-small non-tie problems. Conversely, our data are better accommodated by the memory retrieval accounts (e.g., Campbell, 1995), which posit that small non-tie additions are initially solved by algorithmic procedures, but later transition to be solved by direct memory retrieval.

When asked to remember a list of items for later testing, we often repeat earlier items to ourselves as later items are presented. This process, called "rehearsal," develops during childhood. The present study examined the role of rehearsal in recalling lists of semantically related words and used the dual-retrieval model to pinpoint the retrieval processes modified by rehearsal in children and adults. Thirty-one children (Mage = 8.8 years, SD = 0.5, 12 females and 19 males) and 29 adults (Mage = 20.5 years, SD = 2.7, 23 females and 6 males) performed a complex span task consisting of maintaining words to be recalled later in immediate and delayed tests, while performing a concurrent task. The difficulty of the task was adjusted according to each participant's abilities. Participants performed the task either silently, which allowed them to use rehearsal, or under articulatory suppression, which reduced rehearsal opportunities. The results showed that, although adults had a higher rate of correct recall, children benefited from rehearsal opportunities for both immediate and delayed correct recall. There were also fewer semantic errors in both age groups when rehearsal could be used. The dual-retrieval model revealed that rehearsal fosters direct access to verbatim memory and reconstruction based on gist memory. Finally, the difference in correct recall and direct access between the two age groups decreased when rehearsal could be used. These findings suggest that, although rehearsal is more effective for adults, children benefit more from it for correct recall and direct access to verbatim traces.

Children with developmental dyscalculia often show impaired performance on number order processing tasks. Recent findings suggest these deficits are not general in nature, but instead specific to certain kinds of sequences. In particular, one proposal is that dyscalculic children struggle specifically to understand that "in order" can refer to sequences outside of the (ascending-consecutive) count-list (e.g., 1-3-5 is in order). However, previous findings in support of this view were limited by (i) only considering ascending sequences and (ii) not accounting for other factors known to influence order processing performance, such as sequence familiarity. To address this, the present study compared a control (n = 28) and dyscalculic group (n = 12), aged between 7-12 years, across ascending and descending sequences varying in familiarity. As expected, dyscalculic children showed impaired performance on ascending non-consecutive sequences (e.g., 1-3-5) but not on ascending consecutive sequences (e.g., 1-2-3). Notably, however, this deficit appeared to remain only for unfamiliar sequences (e.g., 2-5-8) and not familiar ones (e.g., 2-4-6), although this interaction was non-significant. Moreover, dyscalculic children displayed typical performance across both consecutive (e.g., 5-4-3) and non-consecutive (e.g., 5-3-1) descending sequences, neither of which match the traditional count-list. Accordingly, although order processing deficits in developmental dyscalculia do appear specific in nature, they are not necessarily specific to non-count-list sequences.

The present study examined the relationship between self-compassion (SC) and aggressive behavior (AB) in children based on the mediating role of emotional regulation self-efficacy (ERSE). The study also distinguished between positive self-compassion (PSC) and negative self-compassion (NSC) and the influence on aggression.

Statistical learning is a mechanism that allows rapid learning without conscious effort. There is a significant gap in productive methodologies for measuring auditory linguistic statistical learning in children. Additionally, attention and working memory have been theorized to underlie this mechanism, but empirical evidence is mixed. The goal of this study was to develop an auditory linguistic statistical learning task with young children and examine the contribution of attention and working memory to outcomes on the learning task.

For adults, adolescents, and preadolescents, deciding whether to lie or tell the truth is preceded by an analysis of the consequent material costs and benefits for themselves and the recipient. However, unlike older individuals, preadolescents prioritize their own gains and losses over those of others. In this study, we aimed to discover whether primary school-aged children also engage in such analyses. We studied 52 children aged 6-10 years old while engaged in a modified sender-receiver game in which we manipulated the payoff rates for the sender and receiver of a message. Children were more likely to lie for their own or mutual benefit than for the benefit of another player. There was no difference between the lying rates when both parties gained from lying and when lying benefited only the liar. Our findings suggest that, similar to preadolescents, children's decisions to lie or to be truthful rely more on the consequent costs and benefits for themselves than those for the recipients of their messages.

Converging evidence suggests that infants can extract and integrate emotional content from multiple sources (e.g., faces, body postures, and voices). Yet this evidence is mostly based on static representations of emotions, such as photographs, whereas in everyday life, infants are primarily exposed to dynamic input, particularly others' actions. This study investigates whether infants can link emotional information conveyed in action kinematics and facial expressions. To address this issue, we used an ERP priming paradigm in which 12-month-olds were presented with video primes of actions performed with happy or angry kinematics, followed by target images of faces displaying happy or angry facial expressions. Results revealed a P400 congruency effect over the right hemisphere. Specifically, happy faces elicited a larger P400 than angry faces when they followed an incongruent emotional action. Moreover, the P400 was larger for incongruent than for congruent happy facial expressions. Results suggest that bodily kinematics provide infants with crucial contextual and emotional cues that bias their perception of facial expressions from early in life.

Inefficient working memory (WM) processes underlie poor math performance in children with math disabilities (MD). However, the assumed directional relationship between WM and math performance in children with MD has not been tested. Recent studies with large heterogeneous samples of elementary school children show a bidirectional relationship between working memory and achievement (math in this case) in which achievement (i.e., math) plays the dominant role in later WM development. In this study, we investigate the bidirectional relation between WM and math in three cohorts across three grades (Cohort 1 = grades 1 to 3; Cohort 2 = grades 2 to 4; Cohort 3 = grades 3 to 5) of children (N = 651) over three years. Within these cohorts, children with MD (n = 103) were compared to children without MD (n = 446) and high math achievers (n = 175). The results showed that: (1) the pattern of within-subject changes and between-subject changes varied between children with and without MD, (2) age-related increases in math proficiency drew extensively upon WM resources, and (3) model testing showed a directional influence of WM on math for children without MD and high achievers, but not for children with MD. Performance for children with MD reflected a weaker connection between WM and math at the initial stage than in the later stages of learning. Taken together, the results suggest that the dominance of math predictions on later development of WM is not necessarily due to prior math knowledge or a reduction in WM resources, but to the weaker growth of WM relative to math growth.

Understanding fractions is a major hurdle for many students. A key aspect of fraction comprehension is the ability to evaluate their numerical magnitude. Here, we use a number-to-line task, where students point to the location of a number on a graduated line, to characterize errors in fraction comprehension. A total of ∼ 26,000 French pupils from 6th to 10th grade were tested (U.S. equivalent grades). Error rates were high, almost 80 % in 6th grade and 45 % in 10th grade. Errors could be classified into seven dominant patterns, whose frequency varied by grade level and individual performance. Younger and lower-performing children mostly confused fractions with decimals. Older and higher-performing children often confused a fraction ab and its inverse ba. All grades also confused the roles of the numerator and the denominator. We propose a theoretical framework suggesting that errors arise as bugs in the execution of one of two main strategies: children converting the fraction into a decimal, or partitioning the line into units and counting them. This model explains the observed error patterns as stemming from inappropriate strategy selection, flawed execution, or incorrect corrective steps due to flawed execution. Our analysis provides a deeper understanding of the various traps that students face when interpreting a fraction's magnitude, the frequency of these errors, and their sequential order.

Children at the early stage of primary school (typically aged 6-8 years) begin to encounter various stresses, including academic stress stemming from expectations and evaluations by parents, teachers, and peers. Concurrently, this age group experiences accelerated cognitive development, including the crucial capacity of inhibitory control (IC), vital for academic success. In exploring the interplay between these factors, we investigated how acute academic stress affects IC in early primary school children aged 7-8 years. Stress manipulation involved a time-constrained mathematics test with peer comparison and teacher evaluation. IC performance was assessed using the adapted Go/No-go task. Results revealed that children exposed to acute academic stress exhibited impaired IC, evidenced by a significant decrease in No-go stimulus accuracy in post-test compared to pre-test tasks. In contrast, control participants who were not subjected to stress induction but completed the same mathematical test or a simple maze test did not exhibit a similar effect. This study highlights the detrimental effects of acute academic stress on IC in young primary school children, underscoring the importance of reducing excessive academic stress to support the healthy development of children's cognitive functions.

This study explored how children (N = 196, ages 4-10) balance fairness and self-interest when making costly third-party interventions. Using a third-party trust game, children made decisions in both punishment and compensation contexts across three degrees of unfairness. Dynamic time warping (DTW)clustering was applied to identify distinct intervention patterns across unfairness conditions, offering a novel approach to capture children's fairness behaviors as coherent trajectories rather than isolated responses. Results revealed that 4-year-olds, in low unfairness conditions (i.e., a 6:4 distribution), displayed more interventions than 10-year-olds, often exceeding what was required to restore fairness, whereas older children's interventions were more aligned with fairness demands. In low unfairness conditions, inhibitory control was positively associated with intervention intensity, though this effect weakened with age. Age-related differences were evident in the strategies employed, particularly in punishment contexts. Younger children tended to display less clear strategies, while older children were more likely to exhibit either fairness-oriented or self-interest-oriented strategies. Negative empathy-empathy for others' negative emotions-was positively associated with fairness-oriented decisions in punishment situations, with children exhibiting higher negative empathy more likely to be fair. However, the relationship between empathy and third-party compensation was less clear, as empathy was not significantly related to whether participants performed fairness- or self-interest-oriented behaviors. These findings suggest that with age, children's third-party intervention strategies become more context-sensitive, shifting from spontaneous punishment in mild unfairness toward more calculated, fairness- or self-interest-oriented decisions. By contrast, third-party compensation appeared to be relatively unaffected by age in terms of orientation.

Test anxiety impacts students' academic and psychological well-being, influenced not just by their own threat processing but also by their parents' threat processing. This study aims to explore the association between parents' threat processing and children's test anxiety. The study initially recruited 53 parent-child dyads, and 45 dyads (N = 90) remained after data screening, comprising 20 children with high test anxiety (Mean  = 10.44 years) and their parents (Mean  = 38.75 years), and 25 children with low test anxiety (Mean  = 11.13 years) and their parents (Mean  = 38.36 years). All participants completed the emotional Stroop task and had their event-related potentials recorded when processing test-related and non-test-related threatening words, using the interference effects of the N2 and N450 as indicators of threat processing. Results showed that only under non-test-related threatening conditions did parents' N2 and N450 interference effects negatively relate to children's test anxiety levels, s suggesting that parents' neural responses to general threat cues may play a role in shaping children's anxiety and informing family-based interventions.

The objective of the present study was to explore the acquisition of mathematical vocabulary by French preschoolers. Two tasks involving quantitative and spatial vocabulary (one focused on production and the other focused on comprehension) were administered to 128 children aged 3 to 6. The children came from a monolingual vs. multilingual environment and from an advantaged vs. disadvantaged socio-economic family background. The tasks were administered in the language of instruction (French language). Our results revealed an effect of the linguistic environment: children from a multilingual environment performed worse in the production of mathematical words and concepts (and especially spatial ones) than children from a monolingual environment. Furthermore, children from disadvantaged backgrounds performed worse than children from advantaged backgrounds in the comprehension and concept production tasks. Lastly, we observed an interaction between the socio-economic environment and the linguistic factor in the comprehension task. The present results might prompt new ideas and initiatives with regard to the content of educational programs.

Interindividual differences related to factors like sex and family socioeconomic background in spatial ability emerge early. Embedding task-specific tracing into instruction has the potential to support early spatial abilities but must be considered relative to child characteristics and existing problem-solving strategies. Aims were to: 1) evaluate whether adding observed or observed and produced tracing to instruction improved learning of shape identification compared to spoken instruction alone; 2) determine whether performance at pretest and posttest varied as a function of child characteristics; and 3) examine how spoken and gestured problem-solving strategies changed from pretest to posttest and related to both posttest performance and condition. We also assessed the extent to which change in performance varied based upon child characteristics and problem-solving strategy use. In this study, 121 children between 44 and 72 months received brief instruction regarding triangle and rectangle shape properties. Children were divided among three conditions: 1) no tracing or gesture accompanying spoken instruction; 2) task-specific gesture observed alongside instruction; and 3) task-specific gesture observed and produced during instruction. Results indicated that children across all three conditions improved on a shape sorting task. Improvement related to age and receptive vocabulary but not condition. There were trends towards differences associated with sex as well, with girls showing a benefit associated with observing and producing gesture while boys showed equivalent performance across conditions. These findings suggest gesture is not a panacea for supporting early spatial learning. Instead, the effects of instructional cuing likely depend on child characteristics and task context.