Understanding of preterm infant cognitive competences across the first year of life is limited regarding the developmental constructs of continuity, stability, coherence, and predictive validity as well as how they manifest by age and country of origin. This prospective longitudinal study examined and compared mean-level continuity,…

Early exploratory behaviors have been proposed to facilitate children's learning, impacting motor, cognitive, language, and social development. This study related the performance of behaviors used to explore oneself to behaviors used to explore objects, and then related both types of exploratory behaviors to motor, language, and cognitive measures…

This study aimed to analyze the abstraction process of twelve-grade students' continuity knowledge through the RBC+C abstraction model. With this aim, a semi-constructed interview was conducted with two twelfth-grade students and recorded with a video camera. Two different research problems were addressed in the interview, and the students were…

An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Nativist and constructivist approaches to the study of development share a common emphasis on characterizing beginning and end states in development. This focus has highlighted the question of preservation and transformation--whether core aspects of the adult end state are present in the earliest manifestations during infancy. In contrast, a…

Focuses on the question of whether developmental improvement in performance on cognitive tasks is abrupt or continuous. Explains three model-based approaches to this question, and stresses that research conducted in these approaches has indicated that developmental improvements consist of jumps through discrete states. Concludes that these results…

This article is a commentary for the special issue on the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a community tool to assess children's school readiness and developmental outcomes at a group level. The EDI is administered by kindergarten teachers, who assess their kindergarten students on 5 developmental domains: physical health and well-being, social…

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…

Fuzzy trace theory posits that during development the use of verbatim information for solving transitive relationships shifts to the use of gist information. In cognitive developmental research that uses a cross-sectional design, the binomial mixture model is often used to identify such shifts. Because the binomial mixture model assumes equal task…

Examined evidence for transitions in first and second graders' analogical reasoning, over a six-month period. Found strong evidence for bimodality in test performance frequency distributions and weaker evidence for inaccessibility in frequency distributions. Transitional subjects showed a temporary increase of inconsistent solution behavior and…

Delineates the continuing controversy between development and learning, and notes the evidence accumulating for some type of continuum in the processes. Introduces 10 research papers on reconceptualizing the intersection of the two processes and states the arguments for debate and presentation. (ET)

Reports on a study of 18 pairs of mothers and infants of 14-22 months to determine the cognitive and social development of the child in its second year. Results support the prediction that a new stage of development is achieved between 18 and 22 months in both cognitive and social domains. (RJC)

Two experiments used a formal model of developmental discontinuity derived from catastrophe theory to test whether the transition from Rule I to Rule II on the balance scale task proceeds discontinuously from ages 6 to 10, focusing on five catastrophe flags. Found that bimodality, inaccessible region, hysteresis, and sudden jump were clearly…

Asserts that Bennett's edited work offers an informed, sophisticated, and thought-provoking overview of current issues in developmental psychology. Notes the volume prompts theoretical and empirical reflection and provides fair representation of trends and advances in mainstream child developmental psychology. Suggests that a more thematic…