"Little by little, the child develops," wrote an undergraduate in a friend's cognitive development class, and so, for the most part, it is. But what explains the U's of cognitive development? Namy, Campbell, and Tomasello and Cashon and Cohen take a standard approach to understanding U-shaped curves: as the product of a mix of different cognitive…

Gerstadt, Hong, and Diamond (1994) investigated the development of inhibitory control in children aged 3 1/2 - 7 years using the day-night task. In two studies we build on Gerstadt et al.'s findings with a measure of inhibitory control that can be used throughout childhood. In Study 1 (twenty-four 3 1/2-year-olds and sixteen 5-year-olds) we…

The neuropsychological bases of cognitive, social, and moral development are minimally understood, with a seemingly wide chasm between developmental theories and brain maturation models. As one approach to bridging ideas in these areas, we review 10 cases of early prefrontal cortex damage from the clinical literature, highlighting overall clinical…

Adults overestimate the detail and depth of their explanatory knowledge, but through providing explanations they recognize their initial illusion of understanding. By contrast, they are much more accurate in making self-assessments for other kinds of knowledge, such as for procedures, narratives, and facts. Two studies examined this "illusion of…

Discriminating what is pretense from what is real is a fundamental problem in development. Research has addressed the proficiency with which adults and children discriminate between play fighting and real fighting, and yet none (to our knowledge) has investigated discrimination of other kinds of pretense and real acts. In addition, little is known…

Earlier investigations have found mixed evidence of source monitoring impairment in autism. The present study examined three types of source monitoring ability in children with autism and typically developing children. In three different conditions, participants were presented with word lists after which they were required to recall the source of…

This study examined the development of neural processing of auditorally presented words in high functioning children with autism. The purpose was to test the hypothesis that electrophysiological abnormalities associated with impairments in early cortical processing and in semantic processing persist into early adolescence in autistic individuals.…

The employment rate for mothers with young children has increased dramatically over the past 25 years. Estimating the effects of maternal employment on children's development is challenged by selection bias and the missing data endemic to most policy research. To address these issues, this study uses propensity score matching and multiple…

Fifty 1-to 3-year-olds were asked to imitate: (1) the rolling of a cylinder down an incline and (2) the making of an incline with a board and a block. Their incorrect imitations and progress were videotaped and analyzed, and interpreted in light of Piaget's theory about the elaboration of logico-mathematical relationships in an interrelated way.…

Developmental research suggests that some of the mechanisms that underlie numerical cognition are present and functional in human infancy. To investigate these mechanisms and their developmental course, psychologists have turned to behavioral and electrophysiological methods using briefly presented displays. These methods, however, depend on the…

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…

Two tasks of word identification were proposed to children in their last year of upper preschool classes. The results show that identification is not based on an holistic processing but on an analytic one: some letters are enough, especially the first ones. Moreover, their order does not matter. During this period where reading is visuo-semantic…