This chapter reviews the development of looming motion perception in infancy, tracing the progression from early behavioral defensive behaviors, such as blinking, to contemporary EEG-based brain-computer interface approaches. Grounded in ecological optics, it examines how infants learn to detect approaching objects that signal impending collision and how this skill becomes increasingly refined with age and locomotor experience. Behavioral studies show that younger infants tend to rely on simpler cues, such as the visual angle of the approaching object, whereas older infants and crawlers increasingly use time-to-collision information for more accurate responses. High-density EEG studies extend these findings by revealing developmental changes in parieto-occipital brain activity, theta and alpha synchronization, and more efficient neural timing strategies. The chapter also highlights differences between full-term and preterm children, with preterm children showing poorer prospective control and delayed visual motion processing, resulting in sustained vulnerabilities in dorsal-stream function. Recent work further demonstrates that EEG-based BCI methods can detect infant perceptual responses to looming stimuli with promising classification accuracy, pointing toward future applications in early cognitive monitoring and intervention. Overall, the chapter presents looming perception as a powerful window into the developing perception-action system and a potential tool for identifying atypical developmental trajectories early.
Children's cognitive control increases dramatically across development. These changes reflect a confluence of what children can do (their control capacities), what they know how to do (task understanding, familiarity, and strategies), and what they are willing to do (their propensity to allocate, sustain, or withdraw control depending on the task and context). This chapter focuses on children's willingness to engage control, which has received comparatively less attention even though it has significant implications for understanding performance on cognitive control assessments and links with life outcomes, and for designing interventions to support children's cognitive control. We frame willingness within Expected Value of Control theory, which describes cognitive control allocation as the result of a cost-benefit decision process that integrates subjective effort costs, beliefs about efficacy, and the expected value of outcomes. Children calibrate their cognitive control engagement according to costs, efficacy, and expected value. These factors change based on external contexts, internal states, and developmental processes, while nonetheless showing stability within individuals. Cultural experiences provide one external context that can influence when control feels meaningful and worthwhile, such that cross-cultural variations in cognitive control can also be understood in terms of willingness. Together, this framing has key implications for interpreting why cognitive control predicts life outcomes: Children who perform well on cognitive control tasks may also be more consistently willing to engage control across real-world contexts, and some children may reliably experience contexts that encourage greater willingness, suggesting that the predictive validity of cognitive control task partly reflects stable differences in willingness in addition to control capacities.
A longstanding assumption is that children acquire language mainly from adult models, but newer research suggests this cannot be correct. Children experience a great deal of child speech as well, particularly across a broader sample of cultures. They enjoy listening to child speech. They can comprehend and learn from child speech. This chapter discusses acoustic properties unique to child speech; argues for its prevalence and importance as an input source to other children; outlines an account that children recognize speech contingent on the speaker's age and identity; and discusses some outstanding questions about children's comprehension of and learning from child speech. The goal is to convince readers that there is an enormous gap in our knowledge of a major component of children's language input, which shapes both child comprehension and production.
This chapter provides a developmental perspective on "educational opportunities" from early childhood through adolescence. Educational opportunities have gained increasing attention from scholars in multiple disciplines. Yet a developmental perspective has been lacking. We offer an operational definition of educational opportunities that is grounded in developmental theory, and review milestones in children's growth that are key to the study of educational opportunities. In turn, we highlight when, why, and how key educational opportunities unfold inside and outside of school, including at home, in early education, through afterschool activities, and in neighborhoods. We also highlight theories on the accumulation of opportunities across developmental stages and settings, concluding with research recommendations and policy considerations.
Typical visual working memory tasks involve many trials of rapid presentations of simple stimuli to be remembered across short delays. This is rarely how memory is used in the real world: we are almost always able to resample information by making an action just-in-time (eye or head movements) or create one if our memory is not sufficient (cognitive offloading). Deciding how often to sample vs. how much to remember depends on the costs of each option. In this chapter, we bring together work on active online visual memory, research on the sampling-remembering trade-off, cognitive offloading, and for a broader modeling context, resource rational models, which each provide important building blocks for developing a new, ethological approach to the study of working memory. This new approach not only centers new problems in the field, but also provides new insights into the mechanisms of developmental change and individual differences.
