Understanding of preterm infant cognitive competences across the first year of life is limited regarding the developmental constructs of continuity, stability, coherence, and predictive validity as well as how they manifest by age and country of origin. This prospective longitudinal study examined and compared mean-level continuity,…

In 2 studies, the authors examined the development of the relationship between inductive reasoning and visual recognition memory. In both studies, 5- to 6-year-old children and adults were shown instances of a basic-level category (dogs) followed by a test set containing old and new category members that varied in their similarity to study items.…

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about…

To assess predictive relations between joint attention skills, intention understanding, and mental state vocabulary, 88 children were tested with measures of comprehension of gaze and referential pointing, as well as the production of declarative gestures and the comprehension and production of imperative gestures, at the ages of 7-18 months.…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

This study examines the degree to which students' perceptions of teacher support are related to school type (primary versus secondary). The sample included 7,205 students from years 5 to 7 in primary school and years 8 to 10 in secondary school. Previous research has concluded that perceptions of school change negatively when students move from…

Teleo-functional explanations account for objects in terms of purpose, helping us understand objects such as pencils (for writing) and body parts such as ears (for hearing). Western-educated adults restrict teleo-functional attributions to artifact, biological, and behavioral phenomena, considering such explanations less appropriate for nonliving…

Surveyed college students' and both their parents' (282 families), actual attitudes and their perceptions of the other generation's attitudes. Although results confirm that youths perceived less intergenerational continuity in attitudes than their parents, they call into question the connection between psychosocial development status of either…

Studied developmental changes in the experience of solitude between late childhood and early adolescence. Fifth through ninth graders (N=483) provided experience-sampling reports on their companionship and subjective states at random times over a week. Found that in early adolescence solitude comes to have a more constructive role in daily life as…

This study examined the relationship between adult physical activity levels and patterns of activity that were established during childhood. A random digit telephone survey was conducted of noninstitutionalized residents in a medium sized California city. Subjects ages 18 and over who volunteered to participate were questioned about their…

This study investigated the developmental continuity, stability, and organization of infants' behavioral response to mild stress from 1 to 3 months of age. Changes in infant stress reactivity were expected to coincide with a suspected neurobiological shift around the 2nd month. A total of 53 infants and their mothers participated in this study. At…

Examined intraindividual and interindividual differences in self-esteem among 142 rural adolescents during a four-year period encompassing the transition to high school. Cluster analysis identified three distinct, divergent trajectories of self-esteem change from early to middle adolescence: (1) consistently high; (2) small increase; and (3)…

The authors conducted a survey of 1,758 elementary school children (6-14 years old) from December 2001, to March 2002, in 3 Chinese cities with different levels of television advertising. The authors used D. R. John's (1999) model of consumer socialization as the theoretical framework for their study. More than half of the children whom the…

The impact of divorce upon the children's adaptation has increasingly become a topic of concern in developmental research. This study investigates how specific coping resources (self-efficacy, self-esteem) vary according to age and as a correlate of developmental level in children from divorced and intact homes. Researchers also examined the…

Sixteen third grade students, 16 college students, and 16 older adults performed a lexical decision (word-nonword) task to determine age-related differences in the magnitude of contextual priming effects. Context length and target quality (intact versus degraded) were within subject manipulations. A significant Age X Context Length X…