Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one of the most common mental disorders in the world. People with PTSD often have difficulty managing time or have witnessed a traumatic event in the past. PTSD is also associated with memory issues which are characterized by intrusive memories that can cause re-experience aspect of the traumatic event. Through the use of computational models, we aim to investigate the differences in memory retention in spaced vs massed practice presentations. We hypothesize that mass practice will lead to less accuracy in recognition and less intrusive thoughts during retention. Through recruiting healthy adult participants with no history of PTSD or other stress-related psychiatric disorders we get a base data avoiding discrepancies. Participants view visual stimuli as images, either neutral or triggering which are presented in pseudo-order and are asked to rate them based on their valence ranging from neutral to extremely negative. The images are presented under two conditions: mass and space presentation. For spaced presentation, different versions of the triggering image category are presented in no particular order with neutral and filler images in between. For massed presentation, all versions of the triggering image category are presented one after the other with no neutral or filler images in between. 24 hours after the initial presentation of the images, participants are tested on memory retention in the form of image recognition. Participants are asked about the difficulty of recalling the image and how often they think about the image. Having collected data during AUT 24, we were able to understand there is a correlation present between memory retention in mass and spaced recognition in terms of traumatic and non-traumatic events. By collecting data through WIN 25, we will have greater accuracy in terms of significant data.

Language mixing occurs when words and grammar from two languages combine in the same sentence, demonstrating how bilingual speakers creatively use their language skills. Understanding how bilingual children mix languages provides insight into their thinking and navigation between languages. While prior research has focused on noun mixing, fewer studies have examined verbs. Thus, this study aims to investigate how English-speaking bilingual children (ages 4-7) evaluate two verb-mixing strategies: direct insertion (using a verb directly from one language) and indirect insertion (changing the verb to match the grammar of the other language). Participants will be assigned to one of two conditions: one where both characters mix languages and another where only one character does. This allows us to examine how interlocutor context (the conversational partner's language use) and age influence children's judgments. Participants will be introduced to pairs of cartoon aliens having conversations and told that the aliens just arrived on Earth and are learning English; therefore, they may mix their own language with English words. After watching each conversation, children will rate how well the alien spoke using a scale of expressive faces. We hypothesize that children’s preferences for language mixing will be shaped by interlocutor context and age. We predict that younger children will rate direct insertion more positively, while older children will rate both strategies similarly. However, as older children may be more aware of social dynamics, they will rate strategies more negatively when only one character language mixes compared to both. This manipulation allows us to explore how children's developing social awareness influences their judgments of language mixing and expectations of conversational norms. These findings will provide new insights into how bilingual children think about and use their languages as they grow, as well as how language is tied to communication and social connections. 

The ability to recognize that others have mental states, separate from us, and that these states are not always accurate portrayals of reality, is central for theory of mind (TOM). This capacity becomes particularly crucial when children explain causal relationships, as they must integrate their understanding of causality with their awareness of other's knowledge states. Skills like this are essential for effective communication and reflect a key developmental milestone in both cognitive and social reasoning. This study examines how children process causal scenarios while considering and tracking the knowledge states of multiple people. We will examine how children (ages 4-7) perform with conjunctive causal relationships, where two separate effects must combine to produce an outcome (e.g., watering a plant and giving it fertilizer causes it to bloom). Children are asked to explain how the outcome happened, and what knowledge each character has. The children will be given four causal events, varying in content, and follow the same causal structure, where each character is only aware of one cause (A or B). After the scenario, children will answer open-ended questions to assess their recall of what each character knows and test their understanding of how the outcome (C) occurred. We predict that younger children will recognize the causal outcome but struggle to differentiate knowledge states, while older children will demonstrate an improved ability to tailor their explanations based on other's perspectives. This study extends beyond previous studies that primarily focused on children's passive evaluation of explanation as our study will investigate children's active role in generating explanations tailored to different character's knowledge states. Our findings will contribute to the understanding of how the development of TOM shapes children's ability to understand and reason about causal relationships.

Remembering ‘when’ things happened is difficult relative to ‘where’ things happened. One reason for this may be because time is an abstract concept while locations are concrete. Many cultures worldwide use space to represent time to get around this problem. A common representation is a mental timeline: a linear mental model of time. For most Western adults, the mental timeline flows from left-to-right: representing the past on the left and the future on the right side of space. Previous research suggests that U.S. adults recall the order of events more accurately when items are presented from left-to-right, rather than nonlinearly or from right-to-left, indicating that adults spontaneously organize temporal order in terms of a mental timeline. However, it is unknown what memory processes influence this benefit. We examine the relation between the mental timeline and temporal memory by assessing both encoding (committing to memory) and recall (remembering) phases. In this study, adults first view triplets of images arranged from left-to-right, right-to-left, or nonlinearly (encoding). Then, images are shown individually, and participants identify whether the image appeared first, second, or third within the triplet (recall). We record participants' responses and their pupil dilation. We predict that item location will affect participants’ errors. For example, they might be more likely to incorrectly remember an image as ‘first’ if it appeared on the left, even if the triplet was presented right-to-left. Additionally, we expect adults to exert greater mental effort when encoding triplets presented nonlinearly or from right-to-left, indicated by increased pupil dilation. These results will provide insight into how the mental timeline interacts with temporal memory beyond memory accuracy measures. The pupil dilation measures will reveal the role of mental timeline in the encoding process, and errors will reveal its role in the recall process.

Can early adverse experiences possibly enhance cognitive functions? The current literature pertaining to children and youths with adverse experiences suggests that they often present extensive deficits, potentially showing less working memory, later language disorders, and lower impulse control (Ellis et al., 2020; Dannehl et al., 2017; Dixon et al., 2023; 2016; Snow, 2021). However, this deficit-based perspective is incomplete – the hidden talents framework suggests that children possess adaptive strengths of unique skills that emerge under stress and in particular, adverse environments. Children and youths with experiences of adversity show social and cognitive adaptations, revealing enhancements in certain domains (Ellis et al., 2020). Here, we examine a facet of their adapted strengths: cognitive flexibility in adulthood as a response to childhood unpredictability, defined as the rate of alterations or instability in the individual’s childhood environment. We propose that adults with prior experiences of childhood unpredictability develop enhanced cognitive flexibility to adapt to unpredictable environments. In this experiment, we will recruit a normative sample of 180 adults and measure their cognitive flexibility along with experiences of childhood harshness and unpredictability using the Perceptions of Childhood Harshness and Unpredictability scale and the Number-Letter Task. We predict that participants who experienced a high level of unpredictability will demonstrate more cognitive flexibility compared to those who experienced high general childhood harshness. Preliminary analyses from the UW psychology participant pool indicate similar trends, suggesting that higher childhood unpredictability correlates with increased cognitive flexibility, while higher childhood harshness is associated with lower cognitive flexibility. Framing cognitive flexibility as a form of adaptation from unpredictable environments is imperative to pivot the current narrative toward children’s hidden talents – revealing that children are resilient, adaptive individuals with unique abilities to overcome adversity. 

Children are not merely passive observers; they actively seek to understand the why behind events. A fundamental distinction in causal reasoning is between agentic causes, which attribute outcomes to the actions of an agent like a person, and non-agentic causes, which focus on environmental factors. Do children show preferences for agentic versus non-agentic explanations? Moreover, are they influenced by the outcome’s valence (positive or negative)? This study examines how outcome valence influences children's (4-9 years old) preferences for agentic versus non-agentic causes in situations where the cause is ambiguous. By analyzing their explanatory preferences, we investigate how the valence of outcomes shapes causal reasoning across development. Participants will be presented with scenarios describing everyday events. Each scenario will have a clear positive or negative outcome, and the cause of the event will be ambiguous, with both agentic and non-agentic explanations being plausible. For example, some participants might see an apple falling perfectly into someone's hand (positive), while others see it hitting their head (negative) - events that could be attributed to either a squirrel jumping up and down, or the wind blowing. Participants will then be asked to answer what caused the outcome via a forced-choice task. We predict that children will more often select agentic over non-agentic causes for negative outcomes compared to positive ones. We also expect that as age increases, their choice differences based on outcome valence will be more pronounced. This investigation helps us understand whether agency itself plays a role in early causal reasoning. If children demonstrate a stronger preference for agentic causes in negative outcomes, this may suggest that emotional valence influences how children construct causal explanations. Furthermore, examining children’s explanatory preferences - whether biased toward agentic causes or not - can tell us how they incorporate agency into their developing understanding of causality.

Spatial skills are early predictors of future achievement in STEM, making early spatial development crucial. Early exposure to spatial language helps children form spatial concepts during tasks like guided block play. Parental engagement in spatial play fosters exploration and flexibility. This study looks specifically into interactive play, exploring how parents' active engagement in play with their infants may scaffold their infant's learning. We investigate parent-infant dyads' play engagement with a shape-sorter toy during a 5-minute free-play session. Pre-registered analyses will be conducted on 53 parent-infant dyads (mean infant age = 11.53 months, SD = 0.91). Coders will transcribe videos of free-play sessions, recording the play actions (motor, block, shape, and color play) of parents and infants, and the initiator of play actions. We hypothesize that parents will engage in more shape and color play to facilitate learning by focusing on features of the play objects (e.g., shape, color) while infants will prefer motor play due to its simpler characteristics. We also hypothesize that parents will use more spatial language during spatial play (e.g., shape-focused and block-building play) compared to non-spatial play (e.g., color-focused and motor play). We hypothesize that parents will initiate more spatial play to support infant's spatial ability while infants will engage more in non-spatial play, as their development may incline them towards sensory-driven exploration. To test our hypotheses, we will measure the 1) proportion of time spent on play types by parents and infants, 2) proportion of spatial words used by parents during interactive play, 3) proportion of initiation by parents and infants during interactive play, and 4) infant response to parent guidance by play type. 

In Western cultures, people conceptualize both time and number as progressing linearly from left to right in phenomena known as the mental timeline (past to the left, future to the right) and the mental number line (smaller numbers to the left, larger numbers to the right). These spatial representations are influenced by cultural conventions, particularly the reading direction of an individual’s primary language. The present study investigates whether these two cognitive representations develop simultaneously or independently, and whether familiarity with English print direction predicts a left-to-right mental timeline and number line in preschoolers. Preschoolers arranged three cards depicting either story events or quantities from “first to last” or “smallest to biggest” and completed the Concepts of Print (COP) assessment, which measured their familiarity with print direction. Preschoolers were more likely to represent time in a linear, left-to-right arrangement than number. In addition, linear, left-to-right arrangements in one task predicted similar arrangements in the other task. These findings suggest that cognitive structures for abstract thinking emerge from shared processes, meaning that once children develop this spatial framework for interpreting time, they utilize the same framework for number. Given that the mental number line is a predictor of STEM achievement, this finding suggests that reinforcing spatial representations in one domain (e.g., sequencing events in time) could support numerical understanding. Preliminary results suggest COP scores do not significantly predict linear, left-to-right arrangements when controlling for age. Because not all COP questions refer explicitly to the directionality of print, future analysis will refine COP questions to those that target reading direction. This study contributes to our understanding of how cultural and cognitive factors interact in shaping abstract thought, which could in turn strengthen children's STEM achievement and inform early childhood teaching strategies.

There is evidence that screen habits (i.e., screen time and parental involvement) may be associated with a series of academic achievement precursors among children. Mental rotation is an early emerging spatial skill that serves as a foundational academic precursor, predicting future spatial reasoning abilities and later success in STEM fields. While prior research has found associations between unmediated screen time and outcomes such as language development, little is known regarding how screen time context influences spatial skill development. In this study, we are examining the impacts of children's media use (specifically total screen time and parental mediation) on mental rotation performance. To assess mental rotation abilities, 50 24- to 36-month-old toddlers complete an eye-tracking task requiring them to mentally transform a giraffe to predict the direction it will move. Children respond to the task via anticipatory eye-movements and the giraffe increases in rotation with each successful trial, progressively increasing task difficulty. Mental rotation is assessed based on the highest angle of rotation achieved within the task. Parents report their child’s screen time across different media types and parental mediation through a subsection of the Comprehensive Assessment of Family Media Exposure questionnaire. Parental mediation is defined as parents’ active regulation of the type, duration, and context of screen time exposure. In our analyses, we will investigate the relationship between total screen time and parent-mediated screen use on spatial skill abilities. We hypothesize that children with high parent-mediated screen time and low total screen time, assessed separately, will have stronger mental rotation abilities. Advancements in technology in recent decades have led to an increase in digital media use among children in the United States and we hope our anticipated results will promote a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between media use and spatial skills in early childhood development.