We investigate when infants exhibit knowledge of the familiar size of well-known objects and whether this knowledge is affected by stimulus format, that is, whether the stimuli are presented as real objects or matched pictures. Infants (130 7- and 12-month-olds) saw everyday objects such as sippy cups and pacifiers in their familiar size and novel…

Toddlers show high sensitivity to creator's intention when they interpret pictures. Previous research suggest that toddlers' performance can be facilitated in a picture comprehension task by making available the creator's intention that is, the social origin of picture-creation. The present study aims to test the generalizability of this…

The present research examines the effect of the costliness of an information source on children's selective learning. In three experiments (total N?=?112), 4-to 7-year-olds were given the opportunity to acquire and endorse information from one of two sources. One source, a computer, was described as always accurate; the other source, a…

Knowing the way children and adolescents assess the risk of disease transmission is important because this kind of knowledge may allow health caregivers to better communicate with them. We had 587 students in Spain and France aged 7-16 judge the risk of disease transmission in 28 scenarios of students visiting a sick friend. The scenarios were…

Children's early noun vocabularies are dominated by names for shape-based categories. However, along with shape, material and colour are also important features of many early categories. In the current study, we investigate how the number of shared features among objects influences children's novel noun generalizations, explanations for these…

Robots and humans receive partial, fragmentary hints about the world's state through their respective sensors. These hints--tiny patches of light intensity, frequency components of sound, etc.--are far removed from the world of objects which we feel and perceive so effortlessly around us. The study of infant development and the construction of…

Jones and Herbert describe research on deferred imitation and how this research reflects on the development of explicit memory in infancy. The article raises several interesting questions about how the medial temporal lobe memory system develops. In this commentary, I discuss some of the additional theoretical and empirical questions that are…

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…