This Special Report is a summary of the following publications: (1) "The Role of Home-Visiting Programs in Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect." "The Future of Children," 19(2), 119-146 (Howard and Brooks-Gun 2009); and (2) "Home Visitation and Young Children: An Approach Worth Investing In?" "Social Policy…

Over the second half of the twentieth century, changes occurred in parent reports of their engagement in cognitive activities with their young children in the United States. This article argues that the growing trend of "parenting for cognitive development" in young children in the latter half of the twentieth century is associated with the…

Representational theory of mind (RTM) development follows a universal developmental timetable whereby major advances in reasoning about mental representations occur between the ages of 3 and 5 years old. This progression appears to be only absent in the case of specific neurodevelopmental impairments, such as autism. Taken together, this suggests…

Background/Context: There is much current interest in the impact of early childhood education programs on preschoolers and, in particular, on the magnitude of cognitive and affective gains. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Because this new segment of public education requires significant funding, accurate descriptions are…

Korean American youth experience immigration-related parent-child challenges including language barriers, parent-child conflicts, and generational cultural divides. Using grounded theory methods, this article examines the ways in which 18 Korean American college-enrolled emerging adults retrospectively made sense out of their experiences of…

How can people make the most of their lives in a fast-changing world? And how should adult learning help? These are large questions, and the answers are unlikely to be simple or straightforward. Yet if adult learning does not help people to flourish, then it is hard to see why it should enjoy any public support at all. The evidence for the…

In relating parent-child conversation to children's social cognitive development, we examined how mother-child dyads talked about the psychological world. Seventy mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children made up a story about a series of pictures depicting a sequence of events involving a false belief. Mother-child talk was coded for the use of…

The study of bilingual children shows that learning and using two languages may affect fundamental aspects of cognitive and neural development that influence how knowledge is acquired and used. The positive effects of bilingualism are seen most profoundly in what are known as executive function or self-control tasks, and in how the knowledge that…

Various studies have shown that infants in their first year of life are able to interpret human actions as goal-directed. It is argued that this understanding is a precondition for understanding intentional actions and attributing mental states. Moreover, some authors claim that this early action understanding is a precursor of later Theory of…

Two experiments tested whether 4-year-old children extract and use geometric information in simple maps without task instruction or feedback. Children saw maps depicting an arrangement of three containers and were asked to place an object into a container designated on the map. In Experiment 1, one of the three locations on the map and the array…

Thirty years of work as a graphic facilitator listening visually to people in every kind of organization has convinced the author that visual intelligence is a key to navigating an information economy rich with multimedia. He also believes that theory and disciplines developed by practitioners in this new field hold special promise for educators…

According to the Perceptual Symbols Theory of cognition (Barsalou, 1999), modality-specific simulations underlie the representation of concepts. A strong prediction of this view is that perceptual processing affects conceptual processing. In this study, participants performed a perceptual detection task and a conceptual property-verification task…

The literature on counselor training has included attention to cognitive and interpersonal skill development and has reported on empirical findings regarding the relationship of training with client outcomes. This article reviews the literature on each of these topics and discusses empirical and theoretical underpinnings of recently developed…

Adolescence is a period of marked change in the person's cognitive, physical, psychological, and social development and in the individual's relations with the people and institutions of the social world. These changes place adaptational demands on adolescents, ones involving relations between their actions upon the context and the action of the…

Three experiments investigated 5- through 8-month-olds' ability to encode self-propelled and caused motion and examined whether processing of motion onset changes when crawling begins. Infants were habituated (Experiments 1 and 2) or familiarized (Experiment 3) with simple causal and noncausal launching events. They then viewed the caused-to-move…