To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to…

People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present…

Infants' sensitivity to social contingencies was assessed. In Study 1, 1-month-old infants and their mothers interacted face-to-face in three types of imperfect contingent interactions: Normal, Non-Contingent and Imitation. One-month-old infants did not discriminate these conditions. In Study 2, 3-month-old infants were tested as in Study 1. At 3…

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves,…

Twenty-five newborn infants were tested for auditory-oral matching behavior when presented with the consonant sound /m/ and the vowel sound /a/--a precursor behavior to vocal imitation. Auditory-oral matching behavior by the infant was operationally defined as showing the mouth movement appropriate for producing the model sound just heard (mouth…

Human toddlers demonstrate striking failures when searching for hidden objects that interact with other objects, yet successfully locate hidden objects that do not undergo mechanical interactions. This pattern hints at a developmental dissociation between contact-mechanical and spatiotemporal knowledge. Recent studies suggest that adult non-human…

In this paper, I review some recent submissions to "Developmental Science" that advance our understanding of psychological development. More and more submissions to the journal explore the origins of knowledge and, for psychological knowledge, such origins are multiple. Here I consider the contribution of mechanisms such as contingency detection,…

We measured infants' recognition of familiar and unfamiliar 3-D objects and their 2-D representations using event-related potentials (ERPs). Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants…

In this paper we examine the current status of the science of ADHD from a theoretical point of view. While the field has reached the point at which a number of causal models have been proposed, it remains some distance away from demonstrating the viability of such models empirically. We identify a number of existing barriers and make proposals as…

This paper provides evidence for imitative abilities in neonatal chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"), our closest relatives. Two chimpanzees were reared from birth by their biological mothers. At less than 7 days of age the chimpanzees could discriminate between, and imitate, human facial gestures (tongue protrusion and mouth opening). By the time…

Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind…

Neural networks are applied to a theoretical subject in developmental psychology: modeling developmental transitions. Two issues that are involved will be discussed: discontinuities and acquiring qualitatively new knowledge. We will argue that by the appearance of a bifurcation, a neural network can show discontinuities and may acquire…

The experiments reported here were concerned with the development of delayed self-recognition. Children were videotaped playing a game and were marked covertly with a sticker on their forehead while doing so. The findings, of both a cross-sectional sample and a prospective longitudinal one, revealed that 3- but not 2.5-year-old children reached to…

It is well known that adults with sleep disturbances frequently exhibit a wide range of neurocognitive decrements, and that these deficits are potentially reversible with effective treatment. However, the consequences of respiratory sleep disturbances on neurocognitive function in children have only recently been evaluated, and suggest a strong…

The effects of gaze direction on memory for faces were studied in children from three different age groups (6-7, 8-9, and 10-11 years old) using a computerized version of a task devised by Hood, Macrae, Cole-Davies and Dias (2003). Participants were presented with a sequence of faces in an encoding phase, and were then required to judge which…