Socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly associated with cognitive ability and achievement during childhood and beyond. Little is known about the developmental relationships between SES and specific brain systems or their associated cognitive functions. In this study we assessed neurocognitive functioning of kindergarteners from different…

The present study tests a model of category effects upon stimulus estimation in children. Prior work with adults suggests that people inductively generalize distributional information about a category of stimuli and use this information to adjust their estimates of individual stimuli in a way that maximizes average accuracy in estimation (see…

A fundamental question in developmental science is how brains with and without language compute numbers. Measuring young children's verbal reactions in France (Paris) and in England (Oxford), here we show that, although there is a general arithmetic ability for small numbers that is shared by monkeys and preverbal infants, the development of such…

Year-old infants' play was scored within and outside joint attention with mother and when alone for four levels of maturity: stereotypical, inappropriate relational, appropriate relational, functional. Maternal sensitivity within joint attention was rated on two measures: following infants' interests and scaffolding infants' activities. Infants'…

Changes to a scene often go unnoticed if the objects of the change are unattended, making change detection an index of where attention is focused during scene perception. We measured change detection in school-age children and young adults by repeatedly alternating two versions of an image. To provide an age-fair assessment we used a bimanual…

To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to…

People acquire spatial information from many sources, including maps, verbal descriptions, and navigating in the environment. The different sources present spatial information in different ways. For example, maps can show many spatial relations simultaneously, but in a description, each spatial relation must be presented sequentially. The present…

Infants' sensitivity to social contingencies was assessed. In Study 1, 1-month-old infants and their mothers interacted face-to-face in three types of imperfect contingent interactions: Normal, Non-Contingent and Imitation. One-month-old infants did not discriminate these conditions. In Study 2, 3-month-old infants were tested as in Study 1. At 3…

The focus of the present study was the role of cultural learning in infants' acquisition of pretense actions with objects. In three studies, 18- and 24-month-olds (n= 64) were presented with novel objects, and either pretense or instrumental actions were demonstrated with these. When children were then allowed to act upon the objects themselves,…

Twenty-five newborn infants were tested for auditory-oral matching behavior when presented with the consonant sound /m/ and the vowel sound /a/--a precursor behavior to vocal imitation. Auditory-oral matching behavior by the infant was operationally defined as showing the mouth movement appropriate for producing the model sound just heard (mouth…

Human toddlers demonstrate striking failures when searching for hidden objects that interact with other objects, yet successfully locate hidden objects that do not undergo mechanical interactions. This pattern hints at a developmental dissociation between contact-mechanical and spatiotemporal knowledge. Recent studies suggest that adult non-human…

In this paper, I review some recent submissions to "Developmental Science" that advance our understanding of psychological development. More and more submissions to the journal explore the origins of knowledge and, for psychological knowledge, such origins are multiple. Here I consider the contribution of mechanisms such as contingency detection,…

We measured infants' recognition of familiar and unfamiliar 3-D objects and their 2-D representations using event-related potentials (ERPs). Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants…

In this paper we examine the current status of the science of ADHD from a theoretical point of view. While the field has reached the point at which a number of causal models have been proposed, it remains some distance away from demonstrating the viability of such models empirically. We identify a number of existing barriers and make proposals as…

This paper provides evidence for imitative abilities in neonatal chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"), our closest relatives. Two chimpanzees were reared from birth by their biological mothers. At less than 7 days of age the chimpanzees could discriminate between, and imitate, human facial gestures (tongue protrusion and mouth opening). By the time…