Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in many contexts. There is limited scholarship, however, in the fields of Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education exploring the implications of generative AI for babies and young children. In this Perspectives piece, we discuss potential use cases,…

We explain metacognition as a management of cognitive resources that does not necessitate algorithmic strategies or metarepresentation. When pragmatic, world-directed actions cannot reduce the distance to the goal, agents engage in epistemic action directed at cognition. Such actions often are physical and involve other people, and so are open to…

For more than 30 years, researchers have focused on the important transition that children undergo between the ages of 3 and 5, when they start to solve mind-reading problems that require reasoning about complex mental states, such as beliefs. The main question for debate has been whether, during that transition, children acquire new concepts…

Developmental robotics has forwarded a range of models of development and behaviours. With the variety of systems that have been created, and with some of these approximating prominent human behaviours (e.g. joint attention, word learning, imitation), one may argue that developmental robotics has started to go past robotic models of earwigs…

Robots and humans receive partial, fragmentary hints about the world's state through their respective sensors. These hints--tiny patches of light intensity, frequency components of sound, etc.--are far removed from the world of objects which we feel and perceive so effortlessly around us. The study of infant development and the construction of…

Through her theoretical and empirical work, Mary Rothbart has had a profound impact on the scientific understanding of infant and child temperament. This special issue honors her contributions through the presentations of original, contemporary studies relevant to three primary themes in Rothbart's conceptual approach: the expansive scope and…

This paper seeks to foster a discussion on whether experiments with robots can inform theory in infant motor development and specifically (1) how the interactions among the parts of a system, including the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and the forces acting on the body, induce organizational changes in the whole, and (2) how exploratory…

Imitation is an important means by which infants learn new behaviours. When infants do not have the opportunity to immediately reproduce observed actions, they may form a memory representation of the event which can guide their behaviour when a similar situation is encountered again. Imitation procedures can, therefore, provide insight into infant…

How is the transition between intersubjectivity and subjectivity accomplished? While many developmental theorists have argued that social interaction gives rise to individualistic capacities (e.g. representation, language, consciousness), relatively few theorists have attempted to identify the precise mechanisms that might be responsible for this…

Emergent themes from this special issue on parent-child co-sleeping are featured in this concluding article. Each of the pieces in this collection addressed one or more of the following themes: methodologies for studying parent-infant co-sleeping, physical and social characteristics of the child's sleep environment, associations between sleep…