Falling head over heels for developmental psychology: How to better understand learning?

During infancy and beyond, infants and children have much to learn. Importantly, the way they will acquire this new knowledge and/or these new abilities will have a major impact on both their cognitive and social functioning. This probably explains why, despite decades of extensive research, learning is still a key theme in developmental psychology even today. In this context, the main goal of this symposium is to provide information about how infants and children acquire new abilities and how a better understanding of different learning mechanisms could help us to develop intervention programs aiming at supporting learning throughout childhood. Specifically, after exploring the ability to extract statistical regularities present in the environment as a central mechanism in infants’ learning, the role of metacognition as a key factor to understand individual differences in various cognitive domains such as arithmetic and spelling will be investigated. Finally, we will examine whether early cognitive intervention programs targeting either arithmetic skills or executive functions could have a positive effect on young children’s cognitive and social performance.