The purpose of this study was to identify differences in the length of attention in 2-year-olds across three teaching conditions. A total of 49 2-year-olds were observed within their childcare classrooms. The child's regular classroom teacher was asked to select three highly preferred toys to use in offering the child choices within the teaching…

The current longitudinal study used data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to examine a model of development that emphasizes early caregiving environments as predictors of social emotional competence (including classroom competence). This path analysis…

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system ("bu,"…

A conceptual framework of attention can be organized around three functions of attention: determining how much capacity is to be deployed (attention allocation), for how long (attention maintenance), and to which potential information sources (attention direction). Within this framework, several critical distinctions can be made between processes…

The strong association established between attention skills and school performance has led to increased research in understanding the development of children's attentional processes. How attention develops during early childhood is crucial to understanding partly why children enter school with varying readiness skills. This Snapshot highlights the…

Discusses changes occurring in two-, four-, and six-month-old infants' visual attention span, through a series of experiments examining their ability to orient to peripheral visual stimuli. The results obtained were consistent with the hypothesis that infants get faster with age in shifting attention to a spatial location. (AA)