Describes work and theories of Swiss educator, Jean Piaget. (DS)

Items commonly belong to many categories. Cross-classification is the classification of a single item into more than one category. This research explored 2- to 6-year-old children's use of 2 different category systems for cross-classification: script (e.g., school-time items, birthday party items) and taxonomic (e.g., animals, clothes). The…

Previous research has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn two words that only differ by one of their consonants, but fail to do so when the words differ only by one of their vowels. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels in lexical…

Through the process of decontextualization, the behaviours and objects used in children's pretence become increasingly detached from their real-life contexts and uses (Flavell, 1985). However, whilst age-related changes in children's pretence have been reasonably well documented, the relationship between the decontextualization of form and…

Looking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults and children answer challenging mental-arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998; Phelps, Doherty-Sneddon, & Warnock, 2006). Whilst such "gaze aversion" (GA) is used far less by 5-year-old schoolchildren, its use…

The present research investigates newborn infants' perceptions of the shape and texture of objects through studies of the bi-directionality of cross-modal transfer between vision and touch. Using an intersensory procedure, four experiments were performed in newborns to study their ability to transfer shape and texture information from vision to…

Complex trauma is the result of repeated or chronic traumatic experiences in childhood. The traumatic experiences have a pervasive impact on the child's physical, sensory, emotional, cognitive and social growth. This paper discusses how the proposed diagnostic category, Complex Trauma Disorder, identifies clusters of symptoms and behaviors that…

Due to advances in reproductive technology and more progressive adoption laws, prospective parents now have many more choices and opportunities for how they form their families. This article explores the experiences of adoption, gay and lesbian families, and assisted reproductive technology to illustrate the concept that there are many legitimate…

We examined 6-month-olds' abilities to represent occluded objects, using a corneal-reflection eye-tracking technique. Experiment 1 compared infants' ability to extrapolate the current pre-occlusion trajectory with their ability to base predictions on recent experiences of novel object motions. In the first condition infants performed at asymptote…

In this article, the author shares her experiences as a parent of a child with Down syndrome. Although her son Sam's first years were filled with numerous hospitalizations and visits to pediatricians, which she feared would further delay his development, she soon discovered an organization known as the National Association of Child Development…

The present experiments were aimed at testing Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) assumption that representational flexibility in drawing behavior requires the relaxation of a sequential constraint. A total of two hundred and forty 5- to 9-year-old children produced cross-category drawings (e.g., a house with wings) in 4 conditions. The results indicated…

Objective: To provide an overview of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and its application to the study of white matter in the developing brain in both healthy and clinical samples. Method: The development of DTI and its application to brain imaging of white matter tracts is discussed. Forty-eight studies using DTI to examine diffusion properties of…

From the age of 2.5, children use social information to rapidly form enduring function-based artifact categories. The present study asked whether even younger children likewise constrain their use of objects according to teleo-functional beliefs that artifacts are "for" particular purposes, or whether they use objects as means to any desired end.…

The Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2012 KIDS COUNT[R] Data Book shows both promising progress and discouraging setbacks for the nation's children: While their academic achievement and health improved in most states, their economic well-being continued to decline. This year's Data Book uses an updated index of 16 indicators of child well-being,…