Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

Object exploration is considered a driver of motor, cognitive, and social development. However, little is known about how early childhood education and care settings facilitate object exploration. This study examined if children's exploration of objects during free play was facilitated by the use of particular spatial components (floor, tables,…

Infants imitate others' individual actions, but do they also replicate others' joint activities? To examine whether observing joint action influences infants' initiation of joint action, forty-eight 18-month-old infants observed object demonstrations by 2 models acting together (joint action), 2 models acting individually (individual action), or 1…

Head Start enhances school readiness during preschool, but effects diminish after children transition into kindergarten. Designed to promote sustained gains, the Research-based Developmentally Informed (REDI) Parent program (REDI-P) provided home visits before and after the kindergarten transition, giving parents evidence-based learning games,…

This study examined how societal changes associated with modernization are related to cognitive development. Data were from 4 cultural communities that represented a broad range of traditional and modern elements: the Garifuna (Belize), Logoli (Kenya), Newars (Nepal), and Samoans (American Samoa). Naturalistic observations and the performances of…

This experiment tests the hypothesis that background, adult television is a disruptive influence on very young children's behavior. Fifty 12-, 24-, and 36-month-olds played with a variety of toys for 1 hr. For half of the hour, a game show played in the background on a monaural TV set. During the other half hour, the TV was off. The children…

A total of 146 disadvantaged preschool children were trained in 1 of 3 different types of fantasy activities. The effects of this training were evaluated over a variety of tasks measuring cognitive development and impulse control. (Author/JMB)

Examined three- to five-year-old children's understanding of pretense and deception in folktales in which a villain deceived his victim by pretending to be someone else. Found that the three-year-olds were able to follow the pretense but were not able to grasp the false belief integral to the deception. (MOK)

Nine- to 16-month-old infants explored pairs of novel toys in 2 conditions: violated expectation, in which the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property and the second toy did not; and interest control, in which neither toy produced the interesting property. Infants persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property in the…

In one task, preschoolers pretended to use common objects. Three- and four-year olds used gestures in which body parts represented the objects. Five-year olds used gestures that involved imaginary objects. In a second task, preschoolers were asked to imitate gestures modeled by the experimenter. Three-year olds could not imitate imaginary object…

Three experiments examined 3- to 5-year olds' understanding of the intended nature of pretend behavior. Found that 4-year olds understood intention as a mental cause of action and construed pretend behaviors mentalistically, but systematically associated ignorance of a specific animal with pretending to be that animal. Concludes that Lillard's…

A hypothesized developmental sequence of agent use in pretending was tested in 36 infants between 14 and 24 months of age and was compared with the development of object permanence. (JMB)

Examined 3- to 5-year-olds' attributions of the mental states of television characters depicting make-believe or realistic actions. Found that children who identified when television characters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the pretenders' thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was related to performance on…

Five experiments tested whether children understand pretense intentions before they understand pretense mental representations. Findings revealed that children did not understand that intention is crucial to pretense. Various methodological factors that might have compromised results such as force choice versus yes-no questions or using a…

Maintains that Lillard's and Joseph's articles provide an example of how apparently divergent empirical results may turn out to reflect interesting differences between children and adults. The researchers agreed that for young children, pretense is often, but not necessarily, intentional and neither found evidence for a representational…