The structure of the human brain changes in several ways throughout childhood and adolescence. Perhaps the most salient of these changes is the strengthening of white matter tracts that enable distal brain regions to communicate with one another more quickly and efficiently. Here, we sought to understand whether and how white matter changes…

Progressive developments in scanning technologies over the last decade have led to a surge of new research into the structure and function of the brain and into differences between the brains of teenagers and other adults. This work has not been free of controversy, notably around the question of deficits in the capacity of young people concerning…

Adolescence is a developmental period that entails substantial changes in affective and incentive-seeking behavior relative to both childhood and adulthood, including a heightened propensity to engage in risky behaviors and experience persistent negative and labile mood states. This review discusses the emotional and incentive-driven behavioral…

It has been hypothesized that sensation seeking and impulsivity, which are often conflated, in fact develop along different timetables and have different neural underpinnings, and that the difference in their timetables helps account for heightened risk taking during adolescence. In order to test these propositions, the authors examined age…

Provides background information on Fred Piaget, and describes his three stages of day care director development: pre-managerial, concrete managerial, and formal managerial. (HOD)

Implications for affective education are drawn from an empirical study of 60 upper-middle socioeconomic class 6 to 15 year-olds' responses to questions asking how videotaped actors felt. Percentage frequencies of category use in tape-recorded transcripts coded by two judges revealed no differences by child's sex. Marked developmental differences…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

This paper examines the interrelationship between children's acquisition and use of symbols and the development of imaginative play. The paper focuses on the use of pretend play as an expression of the child's capacity for symbolic functioning and as an index of intellectual development. The first section of the paper reviews developmental changes…

Cognitive activity of children from 1.5 to 5 years of age participating in problem solving and in spontaneous play was analyzed in terms of the successive coordination of existing patterns and the incorporation of new mental components. Analysis identified a series of developmental levels. (Author/RH)

Interpretation of experimental tasks is influenced by knowledge of the language used, by assessment of what the experimenter intends, and by how subjects themselves would normally represent the physical situation. Whether these processes in which children engage in cognitive studies differ from those employed by adults in similar tasks was…

Examines the implications of temporal separation for children's developmental differences in inferences drawn about an individual's characteristics after observing multiple instances of that individual's behavior. Also tests two competing hypotheses about how young children process information separated in time. (HOD)

Research on role-model identification has demonstrated the powerful effect that models have on individuals' behavior. To extend prior research on this phenomenon, the role-model identifications of first-, third-, fifth-, and ninth-grade students were outlined and examined. The results did not support the hypothesis that adolescents identify with…