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"Cognitive Development in Digital Contexts investigates the impact of screen media on key aspects of children and adolescents' cognitive development. Highlighting how screen media impact cognitive development, the book addresses a topic often neglected amid societal concerns about pathological media use and vulnerability to media effects, such as aggression, cyber-bullying and Internet addiction. It addresses children and adolescents' cognitive development involving their interactions with parents, early language development, imaginary play, attention, memory, and executive control, literacy and academic performance."--Provided by publisher

AbstractDespite legal efforts to reduce societal barriers, people with disabilities still face ableist bias, stereotyping, and stigma. According to the social movement hypothesis, people's participation in and identification with activist movements may reduce bias towards social outgroups. Alternatively, people's intergroup attitudes and bias may influence their participation in activist activities. This study used structural equation modeling to investigate whether reduced bias towards people with disabilities is associated with critical activism and/or personal, familial, or work experience with disability. Undergraduates (N = 497) completed an online survey including measures of ableist bias, critical activist orientation, experience with disability, and demographic characteristics. The relation between having a critical activist orientation and lower ableist bias was bidirectional, suggesting reciprocal influences between individual‐level attitudes and participation in progressive social movements. Aligning with intergroup contact theory, personal (lived) and familial experience with disability correlated with reduced ableist bias, and familial and work experience with having a critical activist orientation. Male gender correlated with increased ableist bias, and male gender, White race, and higher social class with lower endorsements of a critical activist orientation. The results suggest that disability experience and social status influence critical activist identity, which predicts lower bias.

In today's politically polarized environment, college students need strategies to discern trustworthy information. Educational interventions have had modest success in teaching students to fact-check online information using lateral reading, i.e., leaving the original content to investigate information sources and claims. College students (N = 157, M = 20.2 years (SD = 4.0), 61.8% F) completed a semester-long online curriculum teaching fact-checking via lateral reading. Students made gains in their lateral reading attitudes (i.e., preference for fact-checking using lateral reading strategies) and use of lateral reading. Preference predicted use at posttest, but not at pretest. At posttest, preference also partially mediated the effect of reading comprehension on use. The majority of students mentioned cognitive and/or contextual factors when explaining how the Internet contributes to political polarization, though their awareness of such factors did not increase post-intervention.

How much morphological variation can children tolerate when identifying familiar words? This is an important question in the context of the acquisition of richly inflected languages where identical word forms occur far less frequently than in English. To address this question, we compared children's (N=96, mean age 4;1, range 2;11–5;1) and adults' (N=96, mean age 21 years) tolerance of word-onset modifications (e.g., for stug: wug and wastug) and pseudoaffixes (e.g., kostug and stugko) in a label-extension task. Word-form modifications were repeated within each experiment to establish productive inflectional patterns. In two experiments, children and adults exhibited similar strategies: they were more tolerant of prefixes (wastug) than substitutions of initial consonants (wug), and more tolerant of suffixes (stugko) than prefixes (kostug). The findings point to word-learning strategies as being flexible and adaptive to morphological patterns in languages.

AbstractWe document the need to examine digital game play and app use as a context for cognitive development, particularly during middle childhood. We highlight this developmental period as 6‐ through 12‐year olds comprise a large swath of the preadult population that plays and uses these media forms. Surprisingly, this age range remains understudied with regard to the impact of their interactive media use as compared to young children and adolescents. This gap in knowledge about middle childhood may reflect strong and widely held concerns about the effects of digital games and apps before and after this period. These concerns include concurrent and subsequent influences of game use on very young children's and adolescents' cognitive and socioemotional functioning. We highlight here what is currently known about the impact of media on young children and adolescents and what is not known about this impact in middle childhood. We then offer recommendations for the types of research that developmental scientists can undertake to examine the efficacy of digital games within the rapidly changing media ecology in which children live. We conclude with a discussion of media policies that we believe can help children benefit from their media use. Our hope is that this review will foster greater investigation of the cognitive socialization, as raised over 20 years ago by developmental psychologist and early games researcher Patricia Greenfield, that digital games serve during the middle childhood period, and childhood more generally.