Children vary in the extent to which their development is shaped by particular experiences (e.g. maltreatment, social support). This variation raises a question: Is there no single level of plasticity that maximizes biological fitness? One influential hypothesis states that when different levels of plasticity are optimal in different environmental…

Adolescence is a period of profound change, which holds substantial developmental milestones, but also unique challenges to the individual. In this opinion paper, we highlight the potential of combining two recently developed behavioural and neural training techniques (cognitive bias modification and functional magnetic neuroimaging-based…

When children learn the name of a novel object, they tend to extend that name to other objects similar in shape--a phenomenon referred to as the shape bias. Does the shape bias stem from learned associations between names and categories of objects, or does it derive from more general properties of children's understanding of language and the…

The use of self-organizing feature maps (SOFM) in models of cognitive development has frequently been associated with explanations of "critical" or "sensitive periods". By contrast, error-driven connectionist models of development have been linked with "catastrophic interference" between new knowledge and old knowledge. We introduce a set of…

Three-year-olds were given a search task with conflicting cues about the target's location. A ball rolled behind a transparent screen and stopped behind one of four opaque doors mounted into the screen. A wall that protruded above one door provided a visible cue of blockage in the ball's path, while the transparent screen allowed visual tracking…

Forty toddlers aged 20 to 24 months were presented with 32 pairs of images with the auditory stimulus Look followed by the name of the target image (e.g. "Look...tree") in an intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. The same series of 16 items was presented first with one image as target and then with the other member of the pair as target.…

In this paper we consider the perceptual and conceptual contributions that shape early word learning, using research on the "shape bias" as a case in point. In our view, conceptual, linguistic, social-pragmatic, and perceptual sources of information influence one another powerfully and continuously in the service of word learning throughout…

Young children tend to generalize novel names for novel solid objects by similarity in shape, a phenomenon dubbed "the shape bias". We believe that the critical insights needed to explain the shape bias in particular, and cognitive development more generally, come from Dynamic Systems Theory. We present two examples of recent work focusing on the…

Darwin (1871) noted that the human musical faculty "must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed". Indeed, previous research with human infants and young children has revealed that we are born with variable musical capabilities. Here, the adaptive purpose served by these differing capabilities is discussed with reference to…

Children's thinking is highly variable at every level of analysis, from neural and associative levels to the level of strategies, theories, and other aspects of high-level cognition. This variability exists within people as well as between them; individual children often rely on different strategies or representations on closely related problems…

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting…

Children rely extensively on others' testimony to learn about the world. However, they are not uniformly credulous toward other people. From an early age, children's reliance on testimony is tempered by selective trust in particular informants. Three- and 4-year-olds monitor the accuracy or knowledge of informants, including those that are…

It is becoming increasingly clear that little in development is predetermined or permanently fixed. Rather, gene expression is activity dependent, and epigenesis is probabilistic. So, the study of genetic disorders needs to change from the still widely held view that developmental disorders can be accounted for in terms of intact versus impaired…

Early experience preserves and refines many capabilities that emerge prenatally. Here we describe another role that it plays--establishing the neural substrate for capabilities that emerge at a much later point in development. The evidence comes from sleeper effects: permanent deficits when early experience was absent in capabilities that normally…

Human infants actively forage for visual information from the moment of birth onward. Although we know a great deal about how stimulus characteristics influence looking behavior in the first few postnatal weeks, we know much less about the intrinsic dynamics of the behavior. Here we show that a simple stochastic dynamical system acts…