In the last century, Jean Piaget proposed one of the most famous theories regarding cognitive development in children. Piaget proposed four cognitive developmental stages for children, including sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and the formal operational stage. Although Piaget's theories have had a great impact on developmental…

A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

Niche construction is the modification of components of the environment through an organism's activities. Humans modify their environments mainly through ontogenetic and cultural processes, and it is this reliance on learning, plasticity and culture that lends human niche construction a special potency. In this paper we aim to facilitate…

Prior research on implicit mind-reading skills has focussed on how infants anticipate other persons' actions. This study investigated whether 11- and 17-month-olds spontaneously attribute false beliefs (FB) even to a simple animated geometric shape. Infants were shown a triangle chasing a disk through a tunnel. Using an eye-tracker, we found that…

Novelty seeking is viewed as adaptive, and novelty preferences in infancy predict cognitive performance into adulthood. Yet 7-month-olds prefer familiar stimuli to novel ones when searching for hidden objects, in contrast to their strong novelty preferences with visible objects (Shinskey & Munakata, 2005). According to a graded representations…

We investigated whether 16-month-old infants' past experience with a person's gaze reliability influences their expectation about the person's ability to form beliefs. Infants were first administered a search task in which they observed an experimenter show excitement while looking inside a box that either contained a toy (reliable looker…

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of…

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor…

The importance of eye gaze as a means of communication is indisputable. However, there is debate about whether there is a dedicated neural module, which functions as an eye gaze detector and when infants are able to use eye gaze cues in a referential way. The application of neuroscience methodologies to developmental psychology has provided new…

This study examined the relation between self-representation and brain development in infants and young children. Self-representation was assessed by mirror recognition, personal pronoun use, and pretend play. Structural brain images were obtained from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Brain development was assessed by a quantitative measure of…

The purpose of the current article is to highlight the importance of operant techniques in developmental research. Although many researchers employ operant techniques within their individual fields of study, the pervasive nature of these techniques is not often acknowledged in the general literature. The present article describes the history of…

Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called "pedagogy" ( Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity,…

Human cognition is founded, in part, on four systems for representing objects, actions, number, and space. It may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners. Each system has deep roots in human phylogeny and ontogeny, and it guides and shapes the mental lives of adults. Converging research on human infants, non-human…

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) underwent a generalizability study examining the consistency and stability of scores. Canonical correlation and principal components factor analysis indicated that the organization of environment changes over the first two years of life, and the amount--not type--of stimulation is…

Presents a day care curriculum for infants and toddlers which is designed to provide maximum learning experiences and is based on Piaget's and Erickson's theories of infant development. (Author/ED)