Examined 2-month-old infants' perception of sparse random-dot displays depicting an illusory shape against a background in three experiments in which background texture, luminance cues, and relative motion information were added or deleted. Found that infants preferred novel stimuli in each condition, revealing an early capacity to perceive shape…

Investigated early determinants of infants' self--other discrimination when presented with a live image of themselves or another person that was either contingent or contingent with delay. Found that infants 4 months and older perceived and acted differently when facing the image of themselves compared to that of another; 9-month-olds showed more…

During birth to 2 years, babies are motivated by an innate need to know about things. At 3 to 4 years, children tend to wonder about a lot of things. They wonder about scary things, how things work, nature, origins, and the world around them. At 5 to 6 years, they tend to increase their awareness, observe and notice a lot of differences. The…

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

Young infants spend most of their waking time looking around, but whether they learn anything about what they see is unknown. We used a sensory preconditioning paradigm and a deferred imitation task to assess if 3-month-olds formed a latent association between 2 objects (S[subscript 1], S[subscript 2]) that they merely saw together. Because…

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18-month-olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental…

This paper presents a study of the effects of "typical" infant day care on children's behavior and development. The variables studied include center versus home programs, length of time in day care, age of child and sex of child. Subjects for the study were 114 boys and girls (ranging in age from 12 to 36 months) enrolled in either a day…

Noting that children must receive nurturing, consistent care during the first 3 years of life in order to reach their full potential as curious, confident, and able life-long learners and contributing members of their families and communities, this guide presents a framework to assist Arkansas caregivers in providing such care for infants and…

This study examined characteristics of a group of adolescent mothers and their infants who participated in an intervention program run by a public health department. The subjects were administered a structured interview and a measure of self-esteem, and efforts were made to obtain their school records from local public schools. The Mental Scale of…

This four-chapter monograph, translated from a 1977 Russian book written originally in Russian for Russians, describes methodology and results of the study of cognitive activity in children with cerebral palsy. An initial chapter reviews research on impairments in cognitive activity and speech defects in such children and on methods of…

Five papers are presented from a 1982 conference on "Developmental and Clinical Aspects of Young Children's Play." In the first paper ("Cognitive Characteristics of Young Children's Play,") S. Rogers summarizes J. Piaget's theories on developmental stages, discusses the relationship of practice play to learning, and then…

Preliminary evidence indicates that children begin to generalize knowledge in a new way at approximately 3 years of age. Forty children between 1.5 and 3.5 years of age were given two tasks of graded complexity. The first and simpler task used four nonoverlapping classes, each composed of four identical objects. Two of the classes were tagged with…

This document, the first in a four-part series, presents a synopsis of a Geneva research report delivered at Cornell University (New York). It describes a study in which 10-month-old infants were given intermittent free-play opportunities to manipulate 18 objects. Regularly presented in disarray were 6 balls, 6 sticks, and 6 open cubes; each set…

Research supported in part by grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (MH-08542).

Stability of child and mother characteristics and the predictability of children's cognitive competence and affective characteristics were investigated as part of a longitudinal study. At 2 years of age, 46 sets of male twins and their parents were observed in the home and were rated for attachment, independence, compliance and conscience on the…