Reviews literature on music perception and cognition in the first year of life and examines their contribution to domains such as child development and music education. Focuses on studies examining musical features and the uses of music in the everyday life of infants and their caretakers. Critiques previous and current literature. Discusses…

Traced emergence of elaborated framework of belief-desire reasoning. Preschoolers and adults were asked to explain why a story protagonist searched for a desired object in an incorrect location. Results suggest that, during late preschool years, conception of cognitive activities as contributing to knowledge and belief becomes integrated into…

Tested in two studies 4- to 7-year-olds' face recognition by manipulating the faces' configural and featural information. Found that even with only a single 5-second exposure, most children could use configural and featural cues to make identity judgments. Repeated exposure and feedback improved others' performance. Even proficient memories were…

How do infants identify the psychological actors in their environments? Three groups of 12-month-old infants were tested for their willingness to encode a simple approach behavior as goal-directed as a function of whether it was performed by (1) a human hand, (2) a morphologically unfamiliar green object that interacted with a confederate and…

Twenty-two children ranging in age from 2 to 3 years were tested on their abilities to apply weight and distance rules to the balance scale. This study was performed to test the prediction that 2-year-olds would be able to understand either a weight rule or a distance rule, but not be able to integrate the two. The sample group was instructed in…

Children's ability to recognize unfamiliar faces shows an unusual developmental trend: performance improves from 6 to 11 years, a temporary regression occurs at 12 years, and then recovery leads to adult-level performance. The first study described in this paper tested 80 children 5 to 11 years of age on a face-matching and recognition task.…

Reports findings of an investigation of the development of 54 children at 8 years of age with congenital rubella. Examines the relation between specific patterns of physical disability and cognitive and adaptive behavior. (ED)

FINDINGS WERE REPORTED ON THE ROLE OF EXPERIENCE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THOSE SKILLS NECESSARY FOR VISUALLY DIRECTED REACHING. THE SKILLS INVOLVED WERE THE ORIENTING, ACCOMMODATING, AND PURSUIT RESPONSES OF THE EYES, ALL OF WHICH ARE ACHIEVED DURING THE FIRST HALF-YEAR OF LIFE. SEVERAL EXPERIMENTAL CHANGES WERE MADE TO THE ENVIRONMENT OF A GROUP OF…

The structure and function of the nervous system as it puts us into contact with our environment is described. Section 1 presents a detailed discussion of the structure of the brain, drawing an analogy to a computer, and discusses the sensory input function. The transport system is then explained in a description of the transmission of sensory…

Analysis of recent literature covering visual experiments with infants and young children documented a progression of visual functions in early development. (Author)

Studied discriminative and investigatory response behavior and effects of response training on children 4-5 to 6-5 years of age. (DR)

Studied the early development of exploratory behavior in 99 infants of 2-5 months. Results show that there are significant changes in spontaneous multimodal exploration of a novel object between 2 and 5 months. (RJC)