A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current…

Evidence from the study of attention among persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing (TD) children suggests a rethinking of the notion that performance inherently reflects disability, ability, or capacity in favor of a more nuanced story that involves an emphasis on styles and biases that reflect real-world attending. We…

The next several pages are intended as a "Commentary" on the six target articles bundled together as a Special Issue of the "Journal of Cognition and Development"--literature reviews and research reports all intended to "build bridges" between the study of cognitive development in typical and atypical populations.

Although much research has examined the development of orienting to social directional cues (e.g., eye gaze), little is known about the development of orienting to nonsocial directional cues, such as arrows. Arrow cues have been used in numerous studies as a means to study attentional orienting, but the development of children's understanding of…

In a series of four experiments, the authors begin by replicating Flavell, Shipstead, and Croft's (1980) finding that many children between 2 and 4 years of age will affirm the invisibility both of themselves and of others--but "not" of the body--when the person's eyes are closed. The authors also render explicit certain trends in the Flavell et…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

In this study, we investigated relations between infants' understanding of intentional actions and measures of social responsiveness during a transitional period, 9- to 11-months. Infants (N = 52) were tested in visual habituation paradigms tapping their understanding of the relation between a person and the object of her attention. Measures of…