Two- to 8-month-old infants interacted with their mother or a stranger in a prospective longitudinal gaze following study. Gaze following, as assessed by eye tracking, emerged between 2 and 4 months and stabilized between 6 and 8 months of age. Overall, infants followed the gaze of a stranger more than they followed the gaze of their mothers,…

The medial temporal lobes (MTL) support declarative memory and mature structurally and functionally during the postnatal years in humans. Although recent work has addressed the development of declarative memory in early childhood, less is known about continued development beyond this period of time. The purpose of this investigation was to explore…

A misconception about spirituality is that it is tied to religion (i.e., belief in and reverence for a supernatural power). Yet, the term "spirituality" is derived from the word "spirit"--often defined as the vital principle or animating force within living things. This definition may reflect some overlap with what is generally covered in…

In three experiments involving 207 preschoolers and 28 adults, we investigated the extent to which young children base moral judgments of actions aimed to protect others on utilitarian principles. When asked to judge the rightness of intervening to hurt one person in order to save five others, the large majority of children aged 3 to 5 years…

This paper provides a brief history of attachment research on fathers as a backdrop against which the other contributions to this volume can be viewed. Empirical research on child-father attachment progressed in four phases and began before Bowlby in 1969 published the first volume of his attachment trilogy. During each phase a different set of…

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotsky's (1998)…

The study of visual attention in infants has used presentation of single simple stimuli, multi-dimensional stimuli, and complex dynamic video presentations. There are both continuities and discontinuities in the findings on attention and attentiveness to stimulus complexity. A continuity is a pattern of looking that is found in the early part of…

J. E. Grusec and M. Davidov (this issue) have taken good steps in formulating a domain-specific view of parent-child interactions. This commentary supports the introduction of domain specificity to analyses of parenting. Their formulation is an advance over formulations that characterized parental practices globally. This commentary calls for…

The question of normal sexuality begins to arise in the treatment of severely sexually abused or sexually offending patients. The author suggests that it is an interesting and delicate moment during the process of recovery when less perverse, more normal sexuality appears mixed with, or even disguised by, the more habitual perverse fantasies.…

Crowding refers to impaired target recognition caused by surrounding contours. We investigated the development of crowding in central vision by comparing single-letter and crowding thresholds in groups of 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. The task was to discriminate the orientation of a Sloan letter E. Single-letter thresholds,…

In this study, we asked whether 14- and 18-month-old infants use the experiences they have previously shared with others when deciding what to point to for them declaratively. After sharing a particular type of referent with an adult in an excited manner, 18-month-olds subsequently found a picture of that type of referent more worthy of…

Ten dyads were observed biweekly from 10 to 24 months of infant age while playing together at home with a set of toys. The aim was to examine whether mother-infant coregulation changes over the second year of the infant's life and whether there are individual differences in that process. Normative trends as well as variability between and within…

The authors tested susceptibility to contagious yawning in 120 children, 1-6 years, to identify the time course of its emergence during development. Results indicated a substantial increase in the frequency of contagious yawning at 4 years. In a second study, the authors examined contagious yawning in 28 children with autism spectrum disorders…

Two studies examined how children between ages 4 and 6 use body shape (i.e., the waist-to-hip-ratio [WHR]) for sex categorization. In Study 1 (N = 73), 5- and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, selected bodies with increasingly discrepant WHRs to be "most like a man" and "most like a woman." Similarly, sex category judgments made by 5- and…

Aim: Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) are known to participate in active play less than typically developing children. However, it is not known whether the activity deficit between children with and without DCD widens or diminishes over time. Method: Data were obtained from a large, prospective cohort study of children…