Infants were followed longitudinally to document the relationship between docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) levels and the development of attention. Erythrocyte (red-blood cell; RBC) phospholipid DHA (percentage of total fatty acids) was measured from infants and mothers at delivery. Infants were assessed in infant-control habituation at 4, 6, and 8…

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…

Students' reactions to classroom learning and the mastery of science vary along a wide spectrum of attitudes and emotions. In particular, we argue here that how learners encounter and learn subject matter is a function of their level of cognitive development. We describe the stages of cognitive development based on the work of William Perry and…

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…

This research investigates the development of symbolic or representational play in two species of the genus "Pan", bonobos ("Pan paniscus") and chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"). The participants varied not only by species, but also as to whether they had become proficient in communicating with humans via a set of arbitrary visual symbols, called…

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%…

Current models of psychological development rely heavily on connectionist models that use supervised learning. These models adapt network weights when the network output does not match the target outputs computed by some agent. The authors present a model of motor learning in which the child uses exploration to discover appropriate ways of…

This research investigated 3- to 5-year-old's understanding of the role of intentional states and action in pretense. There are two main perspectives on how children conceptualize pretense. One view is that children understand the mental aspects of pretending (the rich interpretation). The alternative view is that children conceptualize pretense…

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…

The objective of this study was to explore factors that affect the difficulty of counterfactual reasoning in 3-5-year-old children and to shed light on the reason why counterfactual reasoning relates to understanding false belief [Cognitive Development, 13 (1998) 73-90]. Using travel scenarios, the difference between simple scenarios, in which…

In response to the critique of Gredler and Shields (2004) of Glassman's article "Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, Experience, and Inquiry in Educational Practice" (2001) we suggest that interpretation of theory is dynamic and based very much on the use of that theory as an instrument. Gredler and Shields argue that Glassman misinterprets Vygotsky…

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…

The authors examined how visual selection mechanisms may relate to developing cognitive functions in infancy. Twenty-two 3-month-old infants were tested in 2 tasks on the same day: perceptual completion and visual search. In the perceptual completion task, infants were habituated to a partly occluded moving rod and subsequently presented with …

What do toddlers learn from everyday picture-book reading interactions? To date, there has been scant research exploring this question. In this study, the authors adapted a standard imitation procedure to examine 18- to 30-month-olds' ability to learn how to reenact a novel action sequence from a picture book. The results provide evidence that…