In 'The role of play', the fifth article we are highlighting from the extensive "FORUM" archive available online, Maggie Gracie draws on material and observations she had collected during a year of study in an infant and reception class in the mid-1970s to develop ideas about the need to enable pupils to develop genuine autonomy of…

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%…

The theory of natural pedagogy stipulates that infants follow gaze because they are sensitive to the communicative intent of others. According to this theory, gaze following should be present if, and only if, accompanied by at least one of a set of specific ostensive cues. The current article demonstrates gaze following in a range of contexts,…

Infants' pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants' pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1, 18-month-olds, but not…

The theory of natural pedagogy has proposed that infants can use ostensive signals, including eye contact, infant-directed speech, and contingency to learn from others. However, the role of bodily gestures, such as hand-waving, in social learning has been largely ignored. To address this gap in the literature, this study sought to determine…

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

Three-month-old Cameroonian Nso farmer and German middle-class infants were compared regarding learning and retention in a computerized mobile task. Infants achieving a preset learning criterion during reinforcement were tested for immediate and long-term retention measured in terms of an increased response rate after reinforcement and after a…

When children enter school, their principal way of thinking is through talking aloud (rather than through internal verbalization), and they need to be encouraged in their use of language as they confront new academic problems. (JD)

Discusses important recent strides in the documentation and understanding of the infant's learning and memory capacity. Focuses on the psychobiology of learning, hedonic mediation of approach-avoidance and learned behavior, infant memory, and critical conditions of infancy and behavioral misadventures. (RJC)

Examined the effect of functional values of stimuli on orienting response elicitation. Subjects were 50 4-month-old infants and were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental conditions. Results suggested the importance of taking into account the functional value of stimuli when analyzing infant attention. (MOK)

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a…

Previous research on infant swimming has reported contradictory findings. Cross-sectional observations revealed a disorganized phase between about 3 and 12 months, which was attributed to "cortical inhibition" and implied slow learning (McGraw, 1939). However, training with a single infant during this period revealed rapid acquisition (McGraw,…

During an experiment on infant behavior, it was observed that young children shared toys with their mothers; therefore, a series of research studies was designed to investigate this phenomenon. The general purposes of the research were: (1) to define sharing more precisely and develop objective measures of frequency and duration for it, (2) to…

SEVERAL STUDIES ON SENSORIMOTOR FUNCTIONS IN INFANTS WERE REPORTED. DAY-TO-DAY OBSERVATIONS WERE MADE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED INFANTS IN AN ATTEMPT TO COLLECT BASELINE DATA ON ADAPTIVE ABILITIES IN CHILDREN. THE EVOLUTION OF FUNDAMENTAL SENSORIMOTOR SKILLS WAS TRACED TO PROVIDE CLUES FOR THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS ON THE DEVELOPMENTAL…