Investigated 3-year-olds' understanding of the appearance-reality distinction using verbal response and nonverbal response paradigms in 4 experiments. Found that about 30 percent of children were correct in verbal paradigm; over 90 percent of same children were correct in nonverbal paradigm. Participating in the verbal paradigm impeded children's…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

Article discusses problems associated with promoting intellectual growth in adulthood. Defines characteristics of intelligent behavior as incorporating individual attainment of Resources, Intimacy, Competence, and Health (RICH). Presents the RICH theory as a way to define and address the goals of intelligent enhancement. (JDM)

Investigates the cognitive development of counseling students at 3 points in their training. Analysis showed a linear trend between the students' progression through the program and their cognitive development. Results lend support to the idea that it may be possible to capture the broad development of counselor education students with a…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Notes that regardless of the language, children acquire language on the same general schedule and the same cognitive path. Explores the process of child language acquisition, from sounds, through word meanings, to syntax and grammar. (HTH)

Assessed representational abilities in hearing and deaf 2-year-old children of hearing and deaf mothers. Found group differences in expressive and receptive language based on maternal report and on experimenter assessment, but no differences emerged in child solitary symbolic play or in child- or mother-initiated child collaborative symbolic play.…

Examined individual differences in social cognition among 128 urban preschoolers. Found that individual differences in understanding of false-belief and emotion were associated with differences in language ability, parental occupation, and mothers' education. Variance in family background only contributed uniquely to false-belief understanding.…

The National Study of Student Learning indicated that membership in Greek organizations can have negative effects on students' cognitive development, particularly during freshman year. In contrast, this study at a midwestern research university found Greek students had higher levels of involvement and gains in general abilities than non-Greek…

Details findings indicating that most early linguistic competence is item based. Maintains that language development proceeds without evidence of system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters. Suggests that findings are not easily explained by the development of children's skills of linguistic performance, pragmatics, or other external…

Two experiments examined children's ability to understand and produce graphic symbols for social communication. Found that 2-year-olds did not effectively produce symbols or use an experimenter's symbols. Three- and 4-year-olds improved their symbols after use in social communication and performed above chance with the experimenter's symbol;…

Presents information on prenatal brain development, detailing the functions controlled by the medulla, pons, and midbrain, and the implications for cognitive development. Concludes that fetal cognitive motor activity, including auditory discrimination, orienting, the wake-sleep cycle, fetal heart rate accelerations, and defensive reactions,…

Two studies examined preschoolers' appreciation of how mental states arise. Findings suggest that 3- and 5-year-olds better understood perception-generated beliefs and attitude-generated desires than physiology-generated desires. Four- and 5-year-olds better understood the effects of quantity of experience than of time of experience on…

This article introduces major contributions of educational psychologist, Lev S. Vygotsky, through examination of his dialectical methodological approach. Topics discussed include semiotic mediation, social sources of development, verbal thinking, concept formation, spontaneous and scientific concepts, the zone of proximal development, and higher…

John Bruer previously stated that "brain science has little to offer educational practice or policy" and urged attention to cognitive science. In conjunction with knowledge from other sources, neuroscience findings are yielding additional insights into the learning process. Educators should know about findings on enrichment, constructivism, and…