In this longitudinal study a close association between affective expression and cognitive development was demonstrated. (SB)

Piaget's emphasis on the invariant logic of growth and Vygotsky's emphasis on the centrality of culturally patterned dialog in enabling growth are possibly incommensurate. This incommensurability highlights two ways human beings make sense of the world, by means of logical necessity and of interpretive reconstruction of circumstances. (BC)

Three experiments studied preschoolers' understanding of false beliefs resulting from developmental misconceptions. Found that children showed some (but incomplete) mastery of Level 2 perspective taking, appearance-reality distinction, line of sight, and biological principles of growth and innate potential. Performance was comparable to that with…

Two experiments replicated Flavell et al.'s (1978) finding that 2.5-year-olds can hide an object behind a screen but cannot achieve the same result placing the screen in front. Move-screen performance related to judgment of what a person in a picture was looking at. Move-object task remained easier than the move-screen task even with an…

Individual differences in children's performance on a classification task are modeled by a two component binomial mixture distribution. The model accounts for data well, with variance accounted for ranging from 87 to 95 percent. (RJC)

To examine Fodor's (1992) argument that standard false belief tasks used in developmental research seriously underestimate young children's understanding of false belief, three- and four-year-old children were given three tasks of action prediction and explanation, belief preduction, and knowledge prediction and explanation. The overall pattern of…

Two experiments tested 10-month-old infants' categorization abilities. Infants were presented with a sequence of stimuli depicting members of a given category. Stimuli representing nonmembers of the category were inserted into the sequence. Infants appeared to disregard the nonmembers in the sequence. (MDM)

Proposes a theory of the development of conditional reasoning that combines procedures taken from the mental models theory of Johnson-Laird with a Piagetian analysis of the development of reasoning competence. Describes the theory's explanation of empirical data on the development of conditional reasoning. (BC)

Three experiments involving 80 infants provide evidence that infants at 2.5 and 4 months represent objects and surfaces that they no longer perceive and that they operate on their representations to derive information about an event they have never perceived. Experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action. (SLD)

Three investigations and one main experiment examined whether children ages four to seven differentiate between the causal mechanisms appropriate for different conceptual domains. Results suggest that preschoolers prefer natural mechanisms for color inheritance in biological kinds and recognize the importance of human intentions in producing the…

Discusses 32 books outlining recent advances in the neurosciences and cognitive psychology. For introductory information, readers are referred to three books emerging from the PBS-TV series on the brain. Several books focus on specific brain research developments and on the cooperative/competitive human side of that research. Advanced reading…

Four studies used visual habituation to determine whether infants 5, 6, and 9 months old would attend to those aspects of action related to the actor's goals. Found that infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion. Findings suggest that by 6 months, infants encode actions of persons consistent with more developed…

States that Demetriou and Raftopoulos's theory of cognitive developmental change based on the nature of representation is flawed. Argues against theme of representation as encoding as well as an alternative model of representation as interactivism. Concludes that other issues such as architectural support, variation and selective retention,…

Explored the effect of folding traditional origami forms on size comparison strategies among 4- to 6-year-old Japanese and American children. Found that girls in particular improved superimposition skills through practice, and children's use of superimposition strategies rather than less effective strategies also increased. (JPB)