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Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly recognized as a critical 21st-century skill comparable to reading, writing, and mathematics. CT research spans several disciplines, including psychology, computer science, and education, and is often described as a set of problem-solving skills well-suited to today’s digital society. Based on its presumed importance, CT has been integrated into education curricula and practices worldwide. To date, 128 systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been written in the broad field of CT. In this meta-review, we synthesize these papers to clarify the conceptual foundations of CT and map key trends within the field by examining definitional coherence, global distribution, potential review inflation, and thematic coverage. Through content analysis, we identify Education (primarily K-12), Programming, Tools, Pedagogical approaches, and Assessment as particularly dominant themes and find that CT review research is dominated by authors from China, the United States, Turkey, Brazil, and Hong Kong. We further unveil a recent surge and limited cross-referencing in systematic reviews, suggesting emerging redundancy, though not yet a critical issue. Finally, we address the perhaps greatest challenge facing the CT literature: the concept itself appears conceptually fragmented, with a lack of a coherent definition. We argue that although the definitions in the existing literature differ in character, they remain fundamentally aligned, allowing the formulation of a coherent, unified definition of CT that focuses on abstract models that use computational steps and algorithms to solve problems. This could serve as a common reference frame moving forward.

Children’s ability to ask effective questions is central to self-directed learning and cognitive development. However, surprisingly little is known about how strategically efficient their spontaneous inquiries can be. Prior research has largely relied on tasks that either provide instructional scaffolds explicitly guiding children toward strategic questions, thereby boosting performance, or impose high cognitive demands that may hinder performance. These design features make it difficult to assess children’s independent capacity for strategic inquiry. In this study, 90 children aged 5–7 and 30 adults played a 20-questions-style game in both concrete and abstract versions. The task was designed to minimize unnecessary complexity and instructional support, thereby reducing cognitive load. This approach allowed us to examine spontaneous, self-guided performance. The results revealed that, although efficiency increased with age, even 5-year-olds demonstrated near-optimal performance in the concrete condition. By age 7, children approached adultlike efficiency and flexibly adapted their strategies across contexts. Interestingly, strategic question use can be described as a function of the size of the hypothesis space, with a higher proportion of questions being strategic early in the search when many options remained and a lower proportion as the space narrowed. These findings offer novel insights into young children’s information-seeking abilities, suggesting that when children are left to their own reasoning in settings that are cognitively accessible, efficient, and adaptive, questioning emerges spontaneously, earlier, and more robustly than previously documented.

For decades, digital information has been accessed primarily through text-based interfaces, placing it out of reach for young children who cannot yet read or type. As artificial intelligence (AI) gains the ability to speak and listen in a human-like way, these barriers are disappearing. Young children who have traditionally relied heavily on parents for information now gain access to powerful knowledge sources on their own. This raises a pivotal question: Will AI increasingly share parents’ role as children’s epistemic guides? We examined how 6- and 8-year-olds (N = 70) chose between an advanced conversational AI system and their own parent when seeking answers to questions spanning three knowledge domains with different epistemic structures: factual, social inference, and personal. Children demonstrated a clear pattern of selective epistemic trust. They relied on their parents as privileged sources of personal information but preferred the AI for factual questions and, notably, for social inference questions. Eightyear-olds were less likely than six-year-olds to direct personal questions to the AI. Questionnaire measures further indicated that, with age, children increasingly viewed AI as more knowledgeable than their parents while simultaneously becoming more aware of its fallibility. These findings demonstrate how children may incorporate AI into their epistemic framework as it becomes embedded in daily life. Their willingness to consult AI not only for factual information but also for social inference raises the possibility that AI could become a source through which children make sense of the social world. Determining how robust this pattern is and whether it persists as familiarity increases will be important for understanding AI’s emerging role in the ecology of childhood learning.

Background: Growing up in adversity can create enduring deficits in children’s cognitive and socio-behavioral skills that undermine later-life productivity, reduce human capital, and increase social costs. Early interventions that target caregiver mental health offer a promising pathway to strengthen the developmental environment of children exposed to severe stress. Yet, in low-resource humanitarian settings, evidence on scalable approaches that generate such intergenerational benefits remains limited. War-related displacement places mothers and young children at exceptional risk for psychological distress and impaired functioning, with potential long-term consequences for both generations. Self-Help Plus (SH+), a brief, low-intensity WHO group intervention based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, has shown promising short-term effects in reducing psychological distress among South Sudanese refugee women in Rhino Camp, Uganda. However, key questions remain regarding the durability of these effects and whether improvements in maternal mental health translate into measurable gains in children’s own well-being and early development.

Methods: This two-arm, parallel-group cluster-randomized controlled trial will enroll 720 mother-preschool-aged child (3–5 years) dyads from 24 villages in Rhino Refugee Settlement, Uganda. Villages are randomized 1:1 to receive either SH+ and Enhanced Usual Care (EUC), or EUC only. Assessments are conducted at baseline (T0), 3 months (T1), and 12 months (T2) post-intervention. The primary outcome is maternal psychological distress (Kessler-6) at 12 months (T2). The key secondary outcome is parent-reported child psychosocial wellbeing (Kiddy-KINDLR) at T2. Secondary outcomes include additional indicators of maternal wellbeing and mental health, parenting practices, and child outcomes assessed across study time points, including psychosocial difficulties and child self-reported well- being. Analyses will follow an intention-to-treat approach, adjusting for clustering and relevant covariates.

Discussion:This trial replicates and extends prior evidence on SH+ in a large refugee population. It will examine whether early mental health gains are sustained, and whether intergenerational benefits emerge for preschool-aged children. Findings will inform scalable intervention strategies to promote psychological resilience and child development in humanitarian contexts.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07062341. Prospectively registered on July 11, 2025.

BackgroundGrowing up in adversity can create enduring deficits in children's cognitive and socio-behavioral skills that undermine later-life productivity, reduce human capital, and increase social costs. Early interventions that target caregiver mental health offer a promising pathway to strengthen the developmental environment of children exposed to severe stress. Yet, in low-resource humanitarian settings, evidence on scalable approaches that generate such intergenerational benefits remains limited. War-related displacement places mothers and young children at exceptional risk for psychological distress and impaired functioning, with potential long-term consequences for both generations. Self-Help Plus (SH+), a brief, low-intensity WHO group intervention based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, has shown promising short-term effects in reducing psychological distress among South Sudanese refugee women in Rhino Camp, Uganda. However, key questions remain regarding the durability of these effects and whether improvements in maternal mental health translate into measurable gains in children's own wellbeing and early development.MethodsThis two-arm, parallel-group cluster-randomized controlled trial will enroll 720 mother-preschool-aged child (3-5 years) dyads from 24 villages in Rhino Refugee Settlement, Uganda. Villages are randomized 1:1 to receive either SH+ and Enhanced Usual Care (EUC), or EUC only. Assessments are conducted at baseline (T0), 3 months (T1), and 12 months (T2) post-intervention. The primary outcome is maternal psychological distress (Kessler-6) at 12 months (T2). The key secondary outcome is parent-reported child psychosocial wellbeing (Kiddy-KINDLR) at T2. Secondary outcomes include additional indicators of maternal wellbeing and mental health, parenting practices, and child outcomes assessed across study time points, including psychosocial difficulties and child self-reported wellbeing. Analyses will follow an intention-to-treat approach, adjusting for clustering and relevant covariates.DiscussionThis trial replicates and extends prior evidence on SH+ in a large refugee population. It will examine whether early mental health gains are sustained, and whether intergenerational benefits emerge for preschool-aged children. Findings will inform scalable intervention strategies to promote psychological resilience and child development in humanitarian contexts.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT07062341. Prospectively registered on July 11, 2025.

This study examines the links between urbanization-related factors (crowding, access to institutions, and socioeconomic status) and cognitive development in young children (3-5 years old) in Bhutan, a rapidly urbanizing country in the Global South. Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) on data from 443 families, we find that SES is the strongest predictor of cognitive development, while crowding and institutional access had minimal effects. Higher parental education and income correlate with better cognitive skills, emphasizing SES's crucial role in child development. These findings challenge the assumption that urbanization inherently benefits children by improving access to services, highlighting the persistent impact of economic disparities. This study underscores the need for policies supporting low-income families to mitigate urbanization's negative effects and suggests that these challenges stem largely from poverty, aligning with broader research on socioeconomic factors related to child development.

High levels of performance in video games may share the same underlying foundation for transfer with high levels of performance in musical instruments. The aim of this study was to examine the phenomenon of expertise by studying its underlying processes through eye movements during video game tasks. We compared three distinctly different groups (N = 30 adults) across a training and testing period: (1) people with experience in video games, (2) people with experience playing musical instruments, but no experience with video games, and (3) a control group with no experience with either computer games or musical instruments. Results showed that the musician group distinguished themselves through their pattern of eye movements, showing improvements in visual prediction and performance on par with experienced video game players. While the control group also showed overall improvement in performance and increased eye movements, only the group of musicians performed at the level of experienced video game players. Findings challenge previous assumptions that consider expertise as an isolated and task-specific ability that cannot be generalized to other areas, and have significant implications for how we understand the development of expertise and general learning.

Automated eye tracking has emerged as a powerful method in psychology, and has special benefits when studying infant populations. The field has developed much during the last decades, and while there are numerous reviews on methodological aspects and specific research topics, a general overview of the state and trends of the field has been lacking. That lack leaves the field unguided on several important aspects such as WEIRDness, statistical power and replication issues, unexploited areas of research, and the current status of the field as a whole. We here conducted a systematic review of the complete peer-reviewed English literature on automated eye tracking with children during their first two years of life (793 articles), and extracted dates of publication, author and population geographic affiliation, keywords and sample sizes. The results show that automated eye tracking in infant research is increasingly used, and is accompanied by larger sample sizes, which together suggests improved accessibility. There is a focus on WEIRD populations, and a few broad research topics (methods, language and attention) and specific topics (autism, faces) are dominating the field. The current focus leaves many areas of research understudied, yielding a large potential for more infant eye tracking in the future.

Background

Climate extremes in Africa threaten the food security of war-affected refugees, who often experience mental health challenges that hinder their capacity for agricultural adaptation. Cost-effective, climate-smart farming interventions are crucial for addressing food insecurity in humanitarian contexts, yet evidence on their effectiveness is limited, and the potential benefits of integrating them with mental health interventions remain unexplored. We hypothesize that the success of agricultural interventions, especially under adversity, is influenced by mental health and psychological functioning.

Methods

This study employs a three-arm, parallel-group, cluster-randomized controlled trial (cRCT) in the Nakivale refugee settlement, Uganda. Thirty villages within the settlement will be randomized in a 1:1:1 allocation ratio to one of three conditions: Enhanced Usual Care, a Home Gardening Intervention (HGI) or HGI combined with the peer-delivered psychosocial intervention Self-Help Plus (SH + HGI). A total of 900 refugee mothers and their children (aged 3–4 years) will be enrolled, with 30 dyads per village. The primary outcome is food insecurity at 12 months post-intervention, assessed using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). Secondary outcomes include dietary diversity, child malnutrition and mothers’ psychological distress. Data will be collected at baseline, 3-month and 12-month follow-ups. Primary analyses will use an intention-to-treat (ITT) approach.

Discussion

This study will shed light on the role of mental health in agricultural adaptation for food security, evaluating the efficacy of scalable, cost-effective interventions in a refugee setting. The findings will have implications for the design and implementation of integrated food security and mental health programs in humanitarian and other resource-constrained settings.

Trial registration

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06425523. Registered on 24 May 2024.