The development of self-regulation has been studied primarily in Western middle-class contexts and has, therefore, neglected what is known about culturally varying self-concepts and socialization strategies. The research reported here compared the self-regulatory competencies of German middle-class (N = 125) and rural Cameroonian Nso preschoolers (N = 76) using the Marshmallow test (Mischel, 2014). Study 1 revealed that 4-year-old Nso children showed better delay-of-gratification performance than their German peers. Study 2 revealed that culture-specific maternal socialization goals and interaction behaviors were related to delay-of-gratification performance. Nso mothers' focus on hierarchical relational socialization goals and responsive control seems to support children's delay-of-gratification performance more than German middle-class mothers' emphasis on psychological autonomous socialization goals and sensitive, child-centered parenting.

Recognizing individual faces is an important human ability that highly depends on experience. This is reflected in the so called other-race effect; adults are better at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group, while very young infants do not show this specialization yet. Two experiments examined whether 3-year-old children from two different cultural backgrounds show the other-race effect. In Experiment 1, German children (N = 41) were presented with a forced choice paradigm where they were asked to recognize female Caucasian or African faces. In Experiment 2, 3-year-olds from Cameroon (N = 66) participated in a similar task using the same stimulus material. In both cultures the other-race effect was present; children were better at recognizing individual faces from their own ethnic group. In addition, German children performed at a higher overall level of accuracy than Cameroonians. The results are discussed in relation to cultural aspects in particular.

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Based on longitudinal data, this study compared the gross and fine motor development of Cameroonian Nso children and German middle-class children with assessments at 3, 6, 9, and 40 months. A total of 345 infants from Cameroon (n = 73) and Germany (n = 272) were recruited for this study. Complete longitudinal gross and fine motor assessments based on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development III were available for subsamples of the originally recruited children. As the results show, the predictability of the 40-months assessments from the previous assessments at 3, 6, and 9 months was low. The early gross motor differences between the Cameroonian and the German children decreased across age. Although the differences had disappeared at 40 months at the Bayley scale level, differences at the item level were still substantial. In contrast to gross motor development, the cultural differences regarding fine motor development increased from 3 to 40 months. This increase was not only shown at the scale level but also reflected at the item level. The developmental pattern is discussed with regard to possible consequences for using developmental tests in different cultural contexts.

The present multimethod longitudinal study aimed at investigating development and stability of implicit memory during infancy and early childhood. A total of 134 children were followed longitudinally from 3 months to 3 years of life assessing different age-appropriate measures of implicit memory. Results from structural equation modeling give further evidence that implicit memory is stable from 9 months of life on, with earlier performance predicting later performance. Second, it was found that implicit memory is present from early on, and no age-related improvements are found from 3 months on. Results are discussed with respect to the basic brain structures implicit memory builds on, as well as methodological issues.