Mirror neurons are increasingly recognized as a crucial substrate for many developmental processes, including imitation and social learning. Although there has been considerable progress in describing their function and localization in the primate and adult human brain, we still know little about their ontogeny. The idea that mirror neurons result…

Investigates the ability of 2-year-old children to pretend that one thing is another. Results indicate that when one thing is substituted for another, pretending varies as a function of the number of substitutions. (LLK)

This study investigated the ability of the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS), in combination with neonatal histories and developmental assessments, to predict mental and motor performance of 9-month-old infants on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID). Fourteen normal, full-term infants and 10 average-for-gestational-age,…

This study examined two alternative interpretations of violation-of-expectation findings that young infants can represent hidden objects. Findings indicated that 5-month-olds succeeded in reasoning about the interaction of a visible and a hidden object even though the 2 objects were never simultaneously visible and a 3- or 4-minute delay preceded…

Nine- to 16-month-old infants explored pairs of novel toys in 2 conditions: violated expectation, in which the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property and the second toy did not; and interest control, in which neither toy produced the interesting property. Infants persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property in the…

Tested whether 7-month-olds' means-end behaviors were genuine or the repetition of trained behaviors under conditions of greater arousal. Found that infants' learned button-pushing to light a set of distant lights differed from button-pushing to retrieve toys. Infants demonstrated means-end skills with behaviors that they had not been trained to…

Tested two competing hypotheses explaining infants' failure to search for an object in a new hiding place: (1) that the concept of object is not yet differentiated from the concept of place, and (2) that difficulties in spatial localization are responsible for the search failure. (Author/JMB)

Examined whether early differences in stress reactivity were related to self-recognition at 18 months. Found that self-recognition was related to greater cortisol response and less rapid quieting at 6 to 18 months, whereas cortisol and quieting responses of 2- to 4-month-olds did not differentiate self-recognizers and non-self-recognizers,…

Tested 4-month-olds' memory for surface feature and location information following brief occlusions. Found that when target objects were images of female faces or monochromatic asterisks, infants increased looking times following changes in identity or color but not changes in location or combinations of feature and location. When objects were…

Revealed that 6-month-old infants are unable to access either an original memory or a reactivated memory after lengthy intervals. Despite the fact that their memory processing is more rapid during encoding and retrieval than that of infants half their age, their facility for accessing an original or reactivated memory is weaker than that of such…

Two experiments studied infants' use of remembered knowledge of auditory-visual events to guide reaching and grasping. Results indicated that reaching was initiated and completed after sound cues ceased. Accurate searching depended on subjects' experience in light presentation. Results suggest that 6 1/2-month-olds can represent unseen objects and…

Four experiments utilizing the familiarization-novelty preference procedure examined whether 3- and 4-month-olds could form categorical representations for cats versus dogs from the perceptual information available in silhouettes. Findings indicated that general shape or external contour information centered about the head was sufficient for…

Gergely, Bekkering, and Kiraly (2002) demonstrated that 14-month-old infants engage in "rational imitation." To investigate the development and flexibility of this skill, we tested 12-month-olds on a different but analogous task. Infants watched as an adult made a toy animal use a particular action to get to an endpoint. In 1 condition there was a…

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has…

Aim: The aim of this study was to review the effects of early developmental intervention after discharge from hospital on motor and cognitive development in preterm infants. Method: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or quasi-RCTs of early developmental intervention programmes for preterm infants in which motor or cognitive outcomes were reported…