Four experiments utilizing the familiarization-novelty preference procedure examined whether 3- and 4-month-olds could form categorical representations for cats versus dogs from the perceptual information available in silhouettes. Findings indicated that general shape or external contour information centered about the head was sufficient for…

Examined whether correct eye gaze in a false belief task among 3- to 5-year-olds indexed unconscious knowledge or low confidence conscious knowledge. Found that children "bet" very highly on the location consistent with their explicit answer. Result was supported by a number of conditions that showed that betting was a sensitive measure…

Two studies compared how preschoolers through fifth graders and adults reasoned about psychogenic bodily reactions such as stress-induced headaches. Results supported a developmental path: younger children view psychogenic bodily responses as wholly physical, but with age, view them as both physical and psychological. (Author/KB)

Infants aged 3-5 months (mean of approximately 4 months) were given a novel anticipatory looking task to test object permanence understanding. They were trained to expect an experimenter to retrieve an object from behind a transparent screen upon hearing a cue (''Doors up, here comes the hand''). The experimenter then hid the object behind one of…

The theory-of-mind abilities of twins, children with nontwin siblings, and only children were compared to investigate further the link between number and type of siblings and theory-of-mind abilities. Three- to 5-year-old children with nontwin siblings outperformed both only children and twins with no other siblings, twins who also had other…

It has become increasingly common for theories to rely on a constraint that 1 object cannot be in more than 1 place at the same time. Analysis suggests that a 1 object--1 place--1 time constraint as literally stated is false, that a modified constraint is biased toward the visual modality, that it may not be a correct description of the physical…

This review begins with a brief history from Piagetian perspective-taking development, through metacognitive development, and into the past and present field of theory-of-mind development. This field has included research on what infants and children know about a variety of mental states, on possible causes and consequences of mentalistic…

This meta-analysis of 62 studies (N=17,767 adopted children) examined whether the cognitive development of adopted children differed from that of (a) children who remained in institutional care or in the birth family and (b) their current (environmental) nonadopted siblings or peers. Adopted children scored higher on IQ tests than their nonadopted…

Young children are often thought to confuse fantasy and reality. This study took a second look at preschoolers' fantasy/reality differentiation. We employed a new measure of fantasy/reality differentiation--a property attribution task--in which children were questioned regarding the properties of both real and fantastical entities. We also…

Numerous brain areas work in concert to subserve memory, with distinct memory functions relying differentially on distinct brain areas. For example, semantic memory relies heavily on posterior cortical regions, episodic memory on hippocampal regions, and working memory on prefrontal cortical regions. This article reviews relevant findings from…

Infants first generalize across contexts and cues at 3 months of age in operant tasks but not until 12 months of age in imitation tasks. Three experiments using an imitation task examined whether infants younger than 12 months of age might generalize imitation if conditions were more like those in operant studies. Infants sat on a distinctive mat…

Traditional approaches to cognitive development concentrate on the stability of cognition and explain that stability via concepts segregated from perceiving acting. A dynamic systems approach in contrast focuses on the self-organization of behavior in tasks. This article uses recent results concerning the embodiment of cognition to argue for a…

The study investigated native language verbal skills among low and highly proficient bilinguals, using the WISC III verbal subtests. Highly proficient bilinguals showed a superiority for almost all verbal subtests. This finding lends support to Threshold Theory which maintains that bilinguals need to achieve high levels of linguistic proficiency…

Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of…

Socio-emotional behaviour is in part sex-related in humans, although the contribution of the biological and socio-cultural factors is not yet known. This study explores sex-related differences during the earliest communicative exchange, the neonatal imitation in 43 newborn infants (3-96 hours old) using an index finger extension imitative gesture.…