We compared 1- and 2-year-old children's performance on Pretend and Reality tasks. Pretend tasks involved the comprehension of a pretend scenario, whereas Reality tasks did not. For example, the experimenter pretends to drink water from an empty cup, she fills another cup with imaginary water and then invites the child to drink. In the Reality…

A substantial proportion of children and adolescents come to suffer from psychological disorders. This article focuses on the temperament factors that are involved in the pathogenesis of child psychopathology. It is argued that besides the reactive temperament factor of emotionality/neuroticism, the regulative process of effortful control also…

Computers are changing young children's world in profound ways. Research shows that when computer technology is used appropriately in early years of life, it enhances virtually every aspect of development, i.e., cognitive, social, emotional, language and fine motor skills. Thus a very critical issue in today's technologically advanced world is…

Four experiments examined the development of negative priming (NP) in 3-5-year-old children using as a measure of children's executive function (EF) the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task. In the NP version of the DCCS, the values of the sorting dimension that is relevant during the preswitch phase are removed during the postswitch phase.…

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to spontaneously use the relative duration and frequency of another's object-directed gaze for inferring that person's preference. In Experiment 1, analysis revealed a strong age effect for judgment accuracy, which could not be accounted for by cue-monitoring proficiency. Reducing the saliency of the…

Evidence from theory-of-mind tasks suggests that young children have substantial difficulty thinking about multiple object identity and multiple versions of reality. On the other hand, evidence from children's understanding of pretense indicates that children have little trouble understanding dual object identity and counterfactual scenarios that…

This paper describes the application of theories underlying research-in-progress intended to enhance substantially the cognitive development of children in the first two years of Primary school. The intervention is delivered partly in the context of mathematics, and partly through an existing Y1 intervention focused on Piaget's concrete…

Are abstract representations of number--representations that are independent of the particular type of entities that are enumerated--a product of human language or culture, or do they trace back to human infancy? To address this question, four experiments investigated whether human infants discriminate between sequences of actions (jumps of a…

Maturation of fetal response to music was characterized over the last trimester of pregnancy using a 5-minute piano recording of Brahms' Lullaby, played at an average of 95, 100, 105 or 110 dB (A). Within 30 seconds of the onset of the music, the youngest fetuses (28-32 weeks GA) showed a heart rate increase limited to the two highest dB levels;…

Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts…

The purposes of this research were to examine the developmental relation between reality monitoring and episodic memory, to link reality monitoring to autobiographical memory by using extended naturalistic events, and to examine prefrontal functioning as a potential contributor to development in reality monitoring and episodic memory. In…

This paper explores the process and value of concurrent work with parents when their child is being treated in individual psychotherapy. The position taken is that psychoanalytic understanding generally and the specific formulations presented in this paper have a broader applicability in other aspects and approaches in child and adolescent mental…

The efficiency of infants' actions was observed as they picked up and used food-laden spoons that varied in orientation. Two interventions were designed to facilitate efficient action beyond when infants were presented with one spoon in alternating orientations: one spoon was presented in the same orientation for several consecutive trials to help…

Two-year-olds' appreciation of the shared nature of object labels versus object preferences was examined in 2 studies. A total of 128 24- to 27-month-olds played a finding game with an experimenter during which they were taught a piece of information about a target object in a nonostensive learning context. In Experiment 1, children were presented…

This article begins with an analysis of a 1987 report by a research group of the World Health Organization [WHO] of the United Nations General Assembly, under the heading "The Health of Young People Is the Concern of Society." The author discusses the "Schools of Health" project, as well as the "Health-Promoting…