My argument for an empirical and normative model of children's development applicable to reasoning in mathematics is in three parts. Part I is a review of the evidence from a recent study of the development of young children's (aged 5-7 years) reasoning by mathematical induction. Part II outlines an interpretation in terms of an inclusive unit of…

Knowing what behaviors adults can engage in to accelerate child growth toward desired outcomes is fundamental to achieving the promise of early education and intervention. Once adequate progress-monitoring measures are developed, patterns of child performance over time and in response to certain interventions can be quantified. The ability to…

Four experiments used a preferential looking method to investigate 6-month-old infants' capacity to represent numerosity in visual-spatial displays. Building on previous findings that such infants discriminate between arrays of eight versus 16 discs, but not eight versus 12 discs (Xu & Spelke, 2000), Experiments 1 and 2 investigated whether…

Using the format of a false belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), we investigated the ability of 88 3- and 4-year-olds to ascribe a previously held true belief to a story protagonist. In an unexpected transfer task, children found true belief ascription as difficult as false belief ascription even though they could answer memory questions about…

Research over the past 20 years has revealed that even very young infants possess expectations about physical events, and that these expectations undergo significant developments during the first year of life. In this article, I first review some of this research, focusing on infants' expectations about occlusion, containment, and covering events,…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

Hebbian learning is a biologically plausible and ecologically valid learning mechanism. In Hebbian learning, "units that fire together, wire together". Such learning may occur at the neural level in terms of long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). Many features of Hebbian learning are relevant to developmental theorizing,…

In 4 experiments, we examined 16- and 20-month-old infants' understanding of proper names and count nouns. In each experiment, infants were taught a novel word modeled linguistically as either a proper name (e.g., "DAXY") or a count noun (e.g., "a DAXY") for a stuffed animal shown on a puppet stage. This animal was moved to a new location on the…

This article presents excerpts of the three lectures delivered by George F. Still on March 4, 1902, March 6, 1902, and March 11, 1902. In the first lecture, Still discussed several points in the psychology and development of social control in the normal child and considered the occurrence of defective moral control in in association with general…

Art in Education is generally considered a sideline, a secondary specialty, or something to be integrated into the primary curriculum, i.e. literacy and arts integration. But art is not secondary; it is primary in learning and in human development. Art is, in fact, necessary and optimal for learning to write, read, and perform arithmetic. This…

There have been deep changes in societies during the last decade. As a result, schools face new challenges, such as avoiding exclusion by promoting inclusion. In this paper we present the findings of our efforts to use collaborative work as a mediation tool in order to achieve more inclusive learning settings. This work starts from the assumption…

In a steady diet of shocking daily news stories, the author saw one item that was particularly shocking. A 5-year-old kindergarten child just "lost it" in her classroom, went a little berserk, threw violent fits, and had to be restrained with handcuffs. Such an incident seems to beg for analysis, and countless columnists offered their insights and…

The goal of the study was to examine the developmental course of sleep consolidation from infancy to preschool. The sleep of 50 healthy infants aged 3 months was recorded, at home, with actigraphs (computerised activity monitors). Follow-up recordings were carried out at 6, 9, 12, 20, and 42 months (due to attrition and occasional technical…

The ancient Greek story of King Midas is well known: when granted a wish, he asked that all he touched would turn to gold. It was bad enough when trees and food were transformed, but great was his grief when his beloved little daughter became solid gold. Many culture critics today would use King Midas as a parable for globalization in its…

If developmental psychologists were asked to nominate the most exciting, cutting-edge research area in the field's recent history, many would vote for the area popularly known as theory-of-mind development, the childhood acquisition of everyday, common-sense knowledge and beliefs about the mental world. This article deals with several research…