Expressive language and prosocial behaviour in early childhood: Longitudinal associations in the UK Millennium Cohort Study

Background: Early childhood is a crucial period for language development and building social skills. While distinct, these two processes may impact upon each other.

Aims: The current study aimed to identify the directional associations between expressive language ability and prosocial behaviour between three and five years of age.

Methods: Participants included 14, 004 children and their families enrolled in the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Children’s expressive language and prosocial behaviour were assessed at three and five years of age utilizing standardized assessments and parent reports. Cross-lagged models were used for data analysis.

Results: Better expressive language at three years was associated with increased prosocial behaviour by five years. No support for the inverse direction of association was found.

Conclusions: Children’s early ability to effectively express themselves with others may help in building better social relationships by entry into formal schooling. Programming efforts that are tailored towards enhancing positive behavioural growth and social skills in the toddler years are likely to be effective when expressive language is also a targeted component of the toddler’s skill development.     

Superior implicit memory: a pilot study

In this pilot study, implicit memory was examined in participants selected according to their scores on the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised. Implicit memory was explored using a word-stem completion test after 24 participants had processed texts to be remembered. Variations in priming were observed among 12 Normal and 12 Good memorizers (Verbal Memory scores >110) following presentation of target words in the context of a coherent text. One intriguing result emerged: the magnitude of the priming effect varied by group, greater among Good memorizers than Normal memorizers.     

Social influence on the expression of robbing and bartering behaviours in Balinese long-tailed macaques

Animal Cognition - Animals use social information, available from conspecifics, to learn and express novel and adaptive behaviours. Amongst social learning mechanisms, response facilitation occurs...     

The Dynamic Strategy of Common Sense Against Radical Revisionism

Topoi - Common-sense philosophers typically maintain that common-sense propositions have a certain kind of epistemic privilege that allows them to evade the threats of skepticism or radical...     

Creative thinking and brain network development in schoolchildren

Fostering creative minds has always been a premise to ensure adaptation to new challenges of human civilization. While some alternative educational settings (i.e., Montessori) were shown to nurture creative skills, it is unknown how they impact underlying brain mechanisms across the school years. This study assessed creative thinking and resting-state functional connectivity via fMRI in 75 children (4–18 y.o.) enrolled either in Montessori or traditional schools. We found that pedagogy significantly influenced creative performance and underlying brain networks. Replicating past work, Montessori-schooled children showed higher scores on creative thinking tests. Using static functional connectivity analysis, we found that Montessori-schooled children showed decreased within-network functional connectivity of the salience network. Moreover, using dynamic functional connectivity, we found that traditionally-schooled children spent more time in a brain state characterized by high intra-default mode network connectivity. These findings suggest that pedagogy may influence brain networks relevant to creative thinking—particularly the default and salience networks. Further research is needed, like a longitudinal study, to verify these results given the implications for educational practitioners. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWV_5o8wB5g .

Research Highlights

• Most executive jobs are prospected to be obsolete within several decades, so creative skills are seen as essential for the near future.
• School experience has been shown to play a role in creativity development, however, the underlying brain mechanisms remained under-investigated yet.
• Seventy-five 4–18 years-old children, from Montessori or traditional schools, performed a creativity task at the behavioral level, and a 6-min resting-state MR scan.
• We uniquely report preliminary evidence for the impact of pedagogy on functional brain networks.