Fifty-nine healthy infants were filmed with their mothers and with a researcher at two, four, six and nine months in face-to-face play, and in toy-play at six and nine months. During toy-play at both ages, two indices of joint attention (JA)--infant bids for attention, and percent of time in shared attention--were assessed, along with other…

Recent studies suggest that North American adults exhibit a focused strategy of attention that emphasizes focal information about objects, whereas Japanese adults exhibit a divided strategy of attention that emphasizes contextual information about objects. The current study investigated whether 4- and 5-, 6- to 8-, and 9- to 13-year-old North…

Neural resources subserving spatial processing in either egocentric or allocentric reference frames are, at least partly, dissociated. However, it is unclear whether these two types of representations are independent or whether they interact. We investigated this question using a learning transfer paradigm. The experiment and material were…

Outliers are typically regarded as data anomalies that should be discarded. However, dynamic or "innovative" outliers can be appropriately utilized to capture unusual but substantively meaningful shifts in a system's dynamics. We extend De Jong and Penzer's 1998 approach for representing outliers in single-subject state-space models to a…

Previous research has suggested that children of 5/6 years fail to understand that they are the authority on their own self-knowledge. That is, when asked questions like, "Who knows best when you are feeling tired?", they tend to cite their mother rather than themselves. Here we report a study that, rather than asking about generalities ("Who…

The primary purposes of the present study were to clarify previous work on the association between counterfactual thinking and false belief performance to determine (1) whether these two variables are related and (2) if so, whether executive function skills mediate the relationship. A total of 92 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds completed false belief,…

The advantages of introducing detailed scrutiny of metaphor into the college composition, creative writing, and literature curriculum are multiple. A number of researchers think an understanding of metaphor is important for cognitive development. This article establishes reasons for teaching metaphorical thinking and then goes on to argue that…

There is general agreement that nonverbal animals and humans endowed with language possess an evolutionary precursor system for representing and comparing numerical values. However, whether nonverbal numerical representations in human and nonhuman primates are quantitatively similar and whether linear or logarithmic coding underlies such magnitude…

In this paper, we offer an overview and a critique of the existing theories of the moral-conventional distinction, with emphasis on Nichols's [Nichols, S. (2002). Norms with feeling: Towards a psychological account of moral judgment. "Cognition, 84", 221-236] neo-sentimentalist approach. After discussing some distinctive features of Nichols's…

Recent research has shown that infants as young as 13 months can attribute false beliefs to agents, suggesting that the psychological-reasoning subsystem necessary for attributing reality-incongruent informational states (Subsystem-2, SS2) is operational in infancy. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds' false-belief reasoning extends…

Recent studies have documented an evolutionarily primitive, early emerging cognitive system for the mental representation of numerical quantity (the analog magnitude system). Studies with nonhuman primates, human infants, and preschoolers have shown this system to support computations of numerical ordering, addition, and subtraction involving…

This longitudinal investigation examines developmental changes in orofacial movements occurring during the early stages of communication development. The goals were to identify developmental trends in early speech motor performance and to determine how these trends differ across orofacial behaviors thought to vary in cognitive and linguistic…

Three studies using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm examined onset of productive comprehension of tense/aspect morphology in English. When can toddlers understand these forms with novel verbs and novel events? The first study used familiar verbs and showed that 26-36-month olds correctly matched a past/perfective form ("-ed" or…

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…

We investigated children's ability to generate associations and how automaticity of associative activation unfolds developmentally. Children generated associative responses using a single associate paradigm (Experiment 1) or a Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM)-like multiple associates paradigm (Experiment 2). The results indicated that children's…