Mental rotation (MR) is the ability to transform a mental representation of an object so as to accurately predict how the object would look from a different angle (Sci 171:701-703, 1971), and it is involved in a number of important cognitive and behavioral activities. In this review we discuss recent studies that have examined MR in infants and…

Bilingual environments are more complex than monolingual environments. To adapt to this complexity, bilingual infants may navigate their environment in fundamentally different ways than monolingual infants. Drawing from visual, social, and linguistic processing, in this article, I present evidence to suggest that bilingual and monolingual learners…

Babies think differently than adults, and understanding how they think can help us see their explosive brain growth in everyday behavior. Infants learn language faster than adults do, use statistics to understand how the world works, and even reason about the minds of others. But these achievements can be hidden by their poor self-regulatory…

Prenatal maternal depression affects both mother and fetus with long-term implications for offspring vulnerability to psychopathology through alterations to brain development, stress physiology, negative emotionality, and cognitive control. This article reviews evidence for the negative impact of prenatal maternal depression on offspring…

Infants invite those caring for them to join as companions on an incredible journey. "Infant and Toddler Development from Conception to Age 3" is a helpful guide to that journey. Each chapter taps a distinct area of research to shed light on babies' biological expectations for care and their amazing competence as active participants in…

This article exhorts the observer to take notice of the unconscious and conscious levels of the young child's absorbent mind (infant stare). Montessori notes the social awareness of young children and suggests that their amazing awareness of people, not merely their activities, is integral to observation. [Reprinted with permission from "AMI…

As humans, we are attuned to the moods and emotions of others. This understanding of emotions enables us to interpret other people's actions on the basis of their emotional displays. However, the development of this capacity is not well understood. Here we show a developmental pattern in 10- and 14-month-old infants' sensitivity to others'…

A new solution is offered to the Infant Language Acquisition Problem, rejecting both of Chomsky's alternatives. It proposes that the infant does not acquire his mother tongue by mastering its grammar, whether by inference from personal experience or via an innate Language Acquisition Device such as the UG, but that the language he hears is all…

We argue that infant meaning-making processes are a central mechanism governing both typical and pathological outcomes. Infants, as open dynamic systems, must constantly garner information to increase their complexity and coherence. They fulfill this demand by making nonverbal "meaning"--affects, movements, representations--about themselves in…

Executive functions enable children to pay attention, follow instructions, apply what they have learned, have those "aha!" moments in which they grasp how multiple facts interrelate, think of creative solutions, obey social norms such as waiting their turn and not butting in line or jumping out of their seat, mentally construct a plan,…

This paper offers an overview of research on infants' early behavior toward televised images, followed by an account of the development of "representational competence" with video. Several aspects of representation are involved in young children's understanding and use of video. From a very young age, children form mental representations of the…

The elicited-response false belief task has traditionally been considered as reliably indicating that children acquire an understanding of false belief around 4 years of age. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that false belief understanding emerges much earlier. This leads to a developmental paradox: if young…

Bhatt and Quinn (2011) present a compelling case that human learning is "early" in two very different, but interacting, senses. Learning is "developmentally" early in that even infants show strikingly robust adaptation to the structures present in their world. Learning is also early in an information processing sense because infants adapt their…

Executive functions (EFs) involve a number of interconnected systems that, when compromised, can result in difficulties that affect a child's ability to perform tasks across early childhood settings, including the home and community-based settings. In retrospective research studies, researchers have found that a young child's…

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech-object pairings with…