Adults preferentially use information from the left side of face images to judge gender, emotion, and identity. In this study, we examined the development of this visual-field bias over middle childhood (5-10 years). Our goal was to both characterize the developmental trajectory of the left-side bias (should one exist) and examine the selectivity…

Both adults and adolescents often conform their behavior and opinions to peer groups, even when they themselves know better. The current study investigated this phenomenon in 24 groups of 4 children between 4;2 and 4;9 years of age. Children often made their judgments conform to those of 3 peers, who had made obviously erroneous but unanimous…

The article presents results of a multiple-case study that examined the ways in which parents perceived and influenced the development of five children who showed extraordinary potential in various domains, such as school, sports or music. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect information about the children's development and were…

Behavioural and electrophysiological studies give differing impressions of when auditory discrimination is mature. Ability to discriminate frequency and speech contrasts reaches adult levels only around 12 years of age, yet an electrophysiological index of auditory discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is reported to be as large in…

For teachers, working with young children in the child welfare system can be challenging. A high-quality early learning environment has been linked to long-term positive developmental and academic success. But for children in the child welfare system who are facing significant early challenges, a high quality environment can provide the…

Developmental changes in learning from peers and adults during the second year of life were assessed using an imitation paradigm. Independent groups of 15- and 24-month-old infants watched a prerecorded video of an unfamiliar child or adult model demonstrating a series of actions with objects. When learning was assessed immediately, 15-month-old…

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category…

The accountability movement in education, in general, and early childhood intervention (ECI), specifically, have fueled the debate about the quality, benefits, and limitations of various types of publicly funded ECI and human service programs (PEW Charitable Trusts, 2008; National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, 2009) not only in…

When you think of your child and how he or she is growing, you notice things like how soon he or she smiles, sits up, rolls over, or how well he or she walks, talks, holds a spoon, and feeds himself or herself. Children learn naturally during this time: by watching you and/or other children, and by being taught how to do different things. Because…

Infants from birth do express a sense of their own body as a differentiated entity among other entities in the world, an entity that is situated, physically bounded, organized, and agent in the environment. Quickly however, this implicit sense of self develops to become explicit, conceptual, and more importantly, public and social. This…

Four studies examined preschoolers' sensitivity to agents' knowledge of conventional forms. Three- to 4-year-olds heard a speaker apply either conventional or wrong labels to familiar objects (Studies 1 and 2, N = 57) or peculiar but correct labels (Study 3, N = 19). When then asked by the speaker for the referent of a novel label, children…

What events trigger causal explanatory reasoning in young children? Children's explanations could be triggered by either consistent events (suggesting that explanations serve a confirmatory function) or inconsistent events (suggesting that they promote discovery of new information). In 2 studies with preschool children (N = 80), events that were…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n ˜ 6,950), a nationally representative sample of children born in 2001, we examined school readiness (academic skills and socioemotional well-being) at kindergarten entry for children who attended Head Start compared with those who experienced other types of child care…

This cross-sectional study attempts to investigate the effects of the Aprender em Parceria (A PAR) programme, an intervention in early childhood education and parenting support in the suburbs of Great Lisbon which aims to increase the educational achievement of disadvantaged children from birth to six-years-old. A quasi-experimental design was…

Despite the increasing prevalence of 3-generation family households (grandparent, parent, child), relatively little research has studied these households during early childhood. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Birth Cohort ("N" = ~6,550), this study investigated the associations between…