The value of proactive goal setting and choice in 3- to 7-year-olds' use of working memory gating strategies in a naturalistic task.

Rule-guided behavior depends on the ability to strategically update and act on content held in working memory. Proactive and reactive control strategies were contrasted across two experiments using an adapted input/output gating paradigm (Neuron, 81, 2014 and 930). Behavioral accuracies of 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds were higher when a contextual cue appeared at the beginning of the task (input gating) rather than at the end (output gating).

Perception of visual-tactile colocation in the first year of life.

An ability to perceive tactile and visual stimuli in a common spatial frame of reference is a crucial ingredient in forming a representation of one's own body and the interface between bodily and external space. In this study, the authors investigated young infants' abilities to perceive colocation between tactile and visual stimuli presented on the hands. They examined infants' visual preferences for spatially congruent and incongruent visual-tactile events across two age groups (6 months and 10-months).

Preschool children's control of action outcomes.

Naturalistic goal-directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top-down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3- and 5-year-olds demonstrated good abilities to access goals at the lowest level of the representational hierarchy.

The planning and execution of natural sequential actions in the preschool years.

Preschool children's abilities to learn from observation has been the focus of considerable theoretical and empirical work. A wealth of developmental research suggests that young children reliably over-imitate modeled actions. Across two experiments, we asked whether a single misleading demonstration significantly impacts preschoolers' planning and execution of a familiar event sequence.