The balance between the preservation of early cognitive functions and serious transformations on these functions shifts across time. Piaget's writings, which favored transformations, are being replaced by writings that emphasize continuities between select cognitive functions of infants and older children. The claim that young infants possess…

A hypothesized developmental sequence of agent use in pretending was tested in 36 infants between 14 and 24 months of age and was compared with the development of object permanence. (JMB)

How do infants come to understand references to absent objects? 14-month-old infants first learned a name for a novel toy, which was then placed out of view. The infants who listened to a story mentioning the nonvisible object, looked, pointed, and searched for it more often than did infants who heard a story using a different name. Their behavior…

When an object moves behind an occluder and re-emerges, 4-month-old infants perceive trajectory continuity only when the occluder is narrow, raising the question of whether time or distance out of sight is the important constraining variable. One hundred and forty 4-month-olds were tested in five experiments aimed to disambiguate time and distance…

Compares two types of semantic development (the acquisition of disappearance words and success-failure words) to performance on two types of cognitive tasks (object-permanence and means-ends tasks) among infants. (HOD)

Studies 40 children ages 1 to 3 with respect to stage 6 object permanence, representational language, and symbolic play. Examines methodological problems in investigations of Piaget's model of cognitive-linguistic relationships related to the definition of these variables and associated with the use of correlations for data analysis. (Author/CB)