Investigated the role of physiological self-regulation (cardiac vagal tone) in information processing (habituation) in infants. Found that decreases in vagal tone consistently related to habituation efficiency at 2 and 5 months. Within- and between- age suppression of vagal tone predicted accumulated looking time (ALT), but ALT did not predict…

Maintains that recent elaborations of the Baddeley and Hitch working memory model offer a better account of processes underlying cognitive development than that by existing neo-Piagetian interpretations. Argues that the episodic buffer, newly added to the model, offers a way of dealing with more complex cognitive activities. Suggests that attempts…

Examined source monitoring and false memories in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds related to their memory of information presented by videotape and/or audiotape. Found that certainty rating revealed deficits in children's understanding of when they had erred on source questions and when they had made false alarms. Inhibitory ability accounted for unique…

Given that gestures may provide access to transitions in cognitive development, preschoolers' performance on standard tasks was compared with their performance on a new gesture false belief task. Experiment 1 confirmed that children (N45, M age54 months) responded consistently on two gesture tasks and that there is dramatic improvement on both the…

The author suggests that theory of mind can help the moral developmental field uncover children's concepts of persons and psychological systems. Conversely, moral developmental theory can help theory of mind move toward nonreductionistic theorizing and research.

Function has been considered important in numerous literatures in the study of cognitive development, yet little is known about what and how infants learn about function. Five experiments examined what 10-month-old infants (N=80) learn about functions that involve a sound produced when an object is acted on. Infants habituated to a single object…

Utilization of a footprint trail for locating a hidden person may indicate the extension of semiotics to the spatial domain of search. We sought to determine whether young children implemented footprint tracking, and found that at 3-years they successfully tracked footprints on only 3% of trials, at 4-years on 9% of trials, and at 5-years on 41%…

Over the past three decades impressive progress has been made in documenting the development of encoding, storage, and retrieval processes in preverbal infants and children. This literature includes an extensive and diverse database as well as theoretical conjecture about the underlying processes that drive early memory development. A selective…

Executive functions (EF) are a group of interrelated complex mental abilities that are involved in planning and initiating goals and carrying them through despite interruptions. As these functions are typically higher-order and involved in integrating other, more basic, lower-order functions, they are difficult to assess directly, and executive…

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8-17 years) and adults (19-71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The…

In two experiments, the principles of cognitive load theory were applied to the design of alternatives to conventional music instruction hypothesised to facilitate learning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that spatial integration of visual text and musical notation, and dual-modal delivery of auditory text and musical notation, were superior to the…

This paper focuses on the changes in thinking involved in the transition from school mathematics to formal proof in pure mathematics at university. School mathematics is seen as a combination of visual representations, including geometry and graphs, together with symbolic calculations and manipulations. Pure mathematics in university shifts…

Children with mental retardation have pronounced difficulties in using cognitive strategies and comprehending abstract concepts--among them, the concept of sequential time (Van-Handel, Swaab, De-Vries, & Jongmans, 2007). The perception of sequential time is generally tested by using scenarios presenting a continuum of actions. The goal of this…

Broca's area encompasses opercular and triangular part of the inferior frontal gyrus, covered by Brodmann's areas 44 and 45, respectively. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed that, in addition to classical language functions, Broca's area has novel and unexpected functions, serving as a likely interface of action and perception important for…

This paper studies the development of taxonomic processing as measured by an adapted version of the Wechsler Similarities subtest, which distinguishes between categorization of concrete and abstract words. Two factors--age and concreteness--are also tested by a recall task. The results show an age-related increase in taxonomic categorization,…