Previous work by our group has shown that infant emotional vitality (EV), the lively expression of shared emotion both positive and negative, predicts cognitive and language abilities in toddlerhood. Specifically, infants who demonstrated a pattern of high emotional expression combined with high bids to their caregivers, fared significantly better…

Asserting that play encourages development of the cognitive map, this article describes the development of a cognitive map and explores the function of play in that development. (JC)

Consistent age changes suggest 2 overlapping developmental dimensions: (1) The ability to deal with visible versus invisible displacements, and (2) with nonsequential versus sequential displacements. Other findings are included. (MH)

One-year-old middle-class infants (N=41) were observed in a free-play setting, administered 11 structured tasks to assess their persistence in mastering tasks, and given the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. As part of another study, home observations were available for 40 of the infants at age one and for 23 of the infants at six months of…

In an attempt to assess the status of the object concept, visual fixation and cardiac deceleration were recorded for 36 infants, 20-24 weeks old, during three kinds of events in which objects moving on a linear trajectory were temporarily occluded by a screen: (1) a familiar object appeared on both sides of the screen; (2) a novel object appeared…

In three shape-constancy experiments, 4- and 7-year olds viewed a circular disc oriented at a slant. All subjects exaggerated circularity of the disc when they knew the object was a circle. Findings suggest that knowledge of reality contaminates judgments of appearance in circle task and this is the same bias that features in realist errors in…

Examined in two studies referential understanding in 12- and 18-month-olds' responses to another's emotional outburst. Found that infants relied on the presence versus absence of referential cues to determine whether an emotional message should be linked with a salient object and they actively consulted referential cues to disambiguate the…

Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative…

This research explored the development of one insight about the mind, namely, the belief that people's trains of thought differ even when they see the same stimulus. In Study 1, 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults heard stories about characters who saw the same object. Although the older groups predicted the object would trigger different trains…

Despite a large body of research demonstrating the kinds of categories to which infants respond, few studies have directly assessed how infants' categorization unfolds over time. Four experiments used a visual familiarization task to evaluate 10-month-old infants' (N=98) learning of exemplars characterized by commonalities in appearance or…

Background: Trials in developing countries suggest that improving young children's diet may benefit cognitive development. Whether dietary composition influences young children's cognition in developed countries is unclear. Although many studies have examined the relation between type of milk received in infancy and subsequent cognition, there has…

Recent decades have witnessed dramatically improved survival rates for infants born prematurely, especially those born very and extremely preterm. Follow-up studies concerned with long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes for children born preterm indicate that these children are at high risk for a range of cognitive, learning, neuromotor, and…

Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

Three experiments investigated 14-, 18-, and 24- month-old infants' understanding of visual perception. Infants viewed films in which a protagonist was either able to view the location of a hidden object (Visual Access condition) or was blindfolded when the object location was revealed (No Visual Access condition). When requested to find the…

The purpose of this study was to cross-sectionally and longitudinally examine the developmental process of search behavior in infancy. Subjects were 23 Japanese normal infants (11 males and 12 females) who were individually tested once a month from the age of six to 13 months in laboratory settings. Small toys and three white opaque cubic boxes…