Little is known about the influence of social context on children's event memory. Across four studies, we examined whether learning that could occur in the absence of a person was more robust when a person was present. Three-year-old children (N = 125) viewed sequential events that either included or excluded an acting agent. In Experiment 1,…

Mobile phones and other wireless devices that produce electromagnetic fields (EMF) and pulsed radiofrequency radiation (RFR) are widely documented to cause potentially harmful health impacts that can be detrimental to young people. New epigenetic studies are profiled in this review to account for some neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioral changes…

Examined the relation of positive affect to attention and learning in 5-, 7-, and 9-month olds. Found that at all ages positive affect was associated with long look durations and slower learning. Neutral affect was associated with short looks and faster learning. Learning was faster than expected for infants displaying both short looks and neutral…

Used a modification of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (1996) task involving interpretation of novel nouns to test whether 18- to 28-month-olds' smart word learning derived from general attention and memory processes rather than knowledge about the communicative intents of others. Findings similar to those of Akhtar and colleagues suggest that…

Three experiments investigated whether preschoolers attend to actions or object when learning a novel verb. Findings showed that children learning nouns in the context of novel, moving objects attended exclusively to appearances of objects. Children learning verbs attended equally to appearances and motions. With familiar objects, children…

Examined the relationship between infants' attachment quality and attention and memory at 3.5 years. Found that insecure/avoidant and insecure/ambivalent children looked away from mother-child drawings more than secure children. Secure children better recalled stories in which mothers responded sensitively than did insecure/avoidant children, and…

Study is an investigation of the effects of an attention-focusing variable--spatial separation of central and incidental cues--and a cognitive strategy factor--verbal labeling of central cues--and their interaction on the incidental learning of Ss younger than those previously tested with these manipulations. (Authors)

Three experiments investigated 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds' perception of the audible, visible, and combined attributes of bimodally specified syllables. Results suggested that at 4 months, infants attended primarily to the featural information, at 6 months primarily to the asynchrony, and at 8 months to both features independently. (Author/KB)