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Insecure-attached adults are more likely to lie. However, it is unknown whether infant-parent attachment quality relates to lie-telling in early childhood. As in adults, lie-telling in early childhood might be related to attachment insecurity. However, a competing hypothesis might be plausible; lie-telling might be related to attachment security given that lie-telling in early childhood is considered an advancement in social-cognitive development. The current study is the first to investigate the link between insecure/secure and disorganized/non-disorganized attachment and lie-telling behavior in early childhood. Because lie-telling is studied in the context of cheating behavior, the association between cheating and attachment is additionally explored. A total of 560 Dutch children (287 girls) from a longitudinal cohort study (Generation R) were included in the analyses. Attachment quality with primary caregiver (secure/insecure and disorganized/non-disorganized attachment) was assessed at 14 months of age in the Strange Situation Procedure, and cheating and lie-telling were observed in games administered at 4 years of age. The results demonstrated no relationship of attachment (in)security and (dis)organization with cheating and lie-telling. Results are interpreted in light of evidence that lie-telling in early childhood is part of normative development. Limitations are discussed, including the time lag between assessments, the fact that lie-telling was measured toward a researcher instead of a caregiver, and the conceptualization of attachment in infancy versus adulthood. Attachment quality does not affect early normative lie-telling, but how and when it may affect later lying in children remains to be explored.

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Introduction: Core aspects of executive functions (EFs) are known to be related to academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. However, school outcomes may also be related to higher-level functions such as planning. Nevertheless, few studies have considered assessing natural manifestations of higher-level EFs in children who are on the cusp of entering formal schooling. One reason for this is the difficulty of obtaining ecologically valid measures of EFs in preschool-aged children. Method: We describe a novel task - building a striped Duplo tower subject to two constraints - designed to assess planning in real-world multi-action situation. Children were instructed to build a tower to a certain height by alternating between two different colors of blocks. Results: Performance on one of the constraints in this task was found to vary with age. Importantly, distinct components of multiple constraints planning performance predicted laboratory-based measures of inhibitory control and working memory efficacy. Discussion: Thus, this task provides a simple, cheap and effective way of assessing executive function in toddlers through the observation of natural behavior. It also opens up possibilities to investigate the neurodevelopment of EF in the real world.

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This study investigated toddlers' ability to control simple alternating pattern actions, and how this relates to motor competence and executive functions. 70 toddlers between 24 and 36 months of age were instructed to sort coins in an alternating pattern into two boxes; left, right, left, right etc. Executive functions and memory competence performance were assessed in additional small games. The results showed that the ability to plan and execute actions according to a simple extended alternating pattern improved over toddlerhood. Furthermore, working memory and motor competence scores were both independent predictors of the ability to plan and execute simple alternating actions. These findings underscore the fact that between 24 and 36 months of age is a period in which the ability to string together multiple actions in a sequence to achieve a distal goal is still developing.

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Actions can convey information about the affective state of an actor. By the end of the first year, infants show sensitivity to such emotional information in actions. Here, we examined the mechanisms contributing to infants' developing sensitivity to emotional action kinematics. We hypothesized that this sensitivity might rely on two factors: a stable motor representation of the observed action to be able to detect deviations from how it would typically be performed and experience with emotional expressions. The sensitivity of 12- to 13-month-old infants to happy and angry emotional cues in a manual transport action was examined using facial EMG. Infants' own movements when performing an object transport task were assessed using optical motion capture. The infants' caregivers' emotional expressivity was measured using a questionnaire. Negative emotional expressivity of the primary caregiver was significantly related to infants' sensitivity to observed angry actions. There was no evidence for such an association with infants' own motor skill. Overall, our results show that infants' experience with emotions, measured as caregivers' emotional expressivity, may aid infants' discrimination of others' emotions expressed in action kinematics.

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Executing goal-directed action sequences is fundamental to our behavior. Planning and controlling these action sequences improves greatly over the preschool years. In this study, we examined preschoolers' ability to plan action sequences. A total of 69 3- to 5-year-olds were assessed on an action sequence planning task with a hierarchical goal structure and on several executive function tasks. Planning abilities improved with age. Improvements in inhibition were related to avoidance of actions irrelevant to the goal hierarchy. Updating skill appears to be associated with executing actions relevant to different subgoals. Using optical motion capture, we showed that children who followed the subgoals displayed less movement with their nonreaching hand within a subgoal. This effect was enhanced in children with better inhibitory skills, suggesting that such skills allow greater focus on executing the current subgoal. Thus, we provide evidence that structuring of subgoals in action sequence planning emerges during the preschool years and that improvements in performance in action sequence planning are related to executive functions.

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Motor theories of action prediction propose that our motor system combines prior knowledge with incoming sensory input to predict other people's actions. This prior knowledge can be acquired through observational experience, with statistical learning being one candidate mechanism. But can knowledge learned through observation alone transfer into predictions generated in the motor system? To examine this question, we first trained infants at home with videos of an unfamiliar action sequence featuring statistical regularities. At test, motor activity was measured using EEG and compared during perceptually identical time windows within the sequence that preceded actions which were either predictable (deterministic) or not predictable (random). Findings revealed increased motor activity preceding the deterministic but not the random actions, providing the first evidence that the infant motor system can use knowledge from statistical learning to predict upcoming actions. As such, these results support theories in which the motor system underlies action prediction.

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