There is an increasing support from international organizations and the research community for stepping beyond infant or child mortality as the most common child level social indicator and progressing towards an international measure of child development. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is a teacher-completed measure of children's…

On March 15, 2007, Santa Barbara residents were shocked when a baby-faced 15-year-old high school student was stabbed to death in the heart of the city's fashionable State Street shopping district. His assailant, just 14, was a member of a rival street gang and a student at the local junior high. "It was a wakeup call for the entire…

This study examined links between paternal and maternal parenting factors and preschool hyperactivity in a community sample. Forty-one hyperactive and 38 comparison boys (aged 47-62 months) and their fathers and mothers were assessed on a range of interview, parent questionnaire, and observational measures of parenting and child behavior. Results…

In this collective case study of caregiver behaviors with their toddlers, two-minute videotaped reading interactions were analyzed using a constant comparative method. Twenty-four caregiver-toddler dyads from a high-risk sample of children prenatally exposed to cocaine were selected from a larger sample because they represented the extremes of…

Developmental robotics has forwarded a range of models of development and behaviours. With the variety of systems that have been created, and with some of these approximating prominent human behaviours (e.g. joint attention, word learning, imitation), one may argue that developmental robotics has started to go past robotic models of earwigs…

Research on navigation has shown that humans and laboratory animals recover their sense of orientation primarily by detecting geometric properties of large-scale surface layouts (e.g. room shape), but the reasons for the primacy of layout geometry have not been clarified. In four experiments, we tested whether 4-year-old children reorient by the…

Many studies have shown that newborns prefer (e.g. Goren, Sarty & Wu, 1975 ; Valenza, Simion, Macchi Cassia & Umilta, 1996) and recognize (e.g. Bushnell, Say & Mullin, 1989; Pascalis & de Schonen, 1994) faces. However, it is not known whether, at birth, faces are still preferred and recognized when some of their parts are not visible because…

Preschoolers' lack of cognitive flexibility has often been attributed to perseverative processing. This study investigates alternative potential sources of difficulty such as deficits in activating previously ignored information and in maintaining currently relevant information. In Experiment 1, a new task tapping attentional switching was…

The developmental origins of mapping temporal relations onto space was investigated in N = 122 3- to 5-year-old children and adults. Spontaneous production and comprehension were investigated. Production was investigated in two conditions: an iconic condition (three-dimensional objects depicting the events or objects to be represented) and an…

A critical challenge for visual perception is to represent objects as the same persisting individuals over time and motion. Across several areas of cognitive science, researchers have identified cohesion as among the most important theoretical principles of object persistence: An object must maintain a single bounded contour over time. Drawing…

Although Sloutsky agrees with our interpretation of our data, he argues that the totality of the evidence supports his claim that children make inductive generalisations on the basis of similarity. Here we take issue with his characterisation of the alternative hypotheses in his informal analysis of the data, and suggest that a thorough Bayesian…

In previous studies of phonological sensitivity, toddlers have failed to differentiate mispronunciations of varying severity. We provide evidence of more sophisticated phonological knowledge. Nineteen-month-olds were presented with displays consisting of one familiar and one unfamiliar object. In Experiment 1, names of familiar objects were…

A principal cites research and personal experience to advocate major changes in the way young children are judged to be ready for kindergarten. They include restricting enrollment before the age of 5 1/2, sharply focused screening, and early involvement of parents.

The stability of sex-typed behavior from the preschool to the middle school years was examined. The Preschool Activities Inventory, a measure of within-sex variation in sex-typed behavior, was completed by the primary caregiver when the child was 2.5, 3.5, and 5 years, and a modified version, the Child Activities Inventory, was completed by the…

In this keynote address, Richard Louv laments that today's children lack direct connection to nature. Over the past 15 years, he interviewed families across the country about the changes in their lives, including their relationship with nature. With few exceptions, even in rural areas, parents say the same thing: Most children aren't playing…