To establish the spatial generality of perseverative errors in infant manual search, a group of infants aged 8-11 months performed Piaget's Stage IV task with an object hidden at successive locations in the vertical plane. (Author/JMB)

Reports on three experiments showing the crucial importance of the "half boundary" in children's proportional judgments. Concludes that the concept of "half" plays a crucial role in children's early proportional reasoning and that the half boundary is similar to, though not as powerful as, the category boundaries discovered in…

This study investigated 3- and 4-year-old's understanding of the relationship between pretense and mental awareness. In Experiments 1 and 2, only a subset of 4-year-olds recognized that sleeping characters and characters ignorant of their appearance were not pretending. However, these experiments had certain linguistic demands, which potentially…

As a dance teacher I am interested in finding ways to improve the quality and effectiveness of the dancers' learning process. My investigations toward this end have primarily focused on uncovering essential somatic characteristics as they relate to dance teaching and learning. The essential somatic concept that the senses and sensitization of the…

The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine…

Everyday environments, even small regions within reach, vary dramatically in terms of material composition. Adapting one's manual behavior to such transitions can be considered to be an important element of skilled action. To investigate the origins of this ability, we presented 8-month-olds (n=24) and 10-month-olds (n=24) hard or soft objects on…

When entering the Blind Childrens Center (BCC), what a person might not realize is that four of the five visually impaired children in a classroom share the same diagnosis of Optic Nerve Hypoplasia (OHN). ONH is the leading cause of blindness and visual impairment in young children. It is important that these children participate in an inclusive…

During the second year of life, infants exhibit a "video deficit effect." That is, they learn significantly less from a televised demonstration than they learn from a live demonstration. We predicted that repeated exposure to televised demonstrations would increase imitation from television, thereby reducing the video deficit effect. Independent…

In normal-hearing children the latency of the P1 component of the cortical evoked response to sound varies as a function of age and, thus, can be used as a biomarker for maturation of central auditory pathways. We assessed P1 latency in 245 congenitally deaf children fit with cochlear implants following various periods of auditory deprivation. If…

In this functional MRI experiment, encoding of objects was associated with activation in left ventrolateral prefrontal/insular and right dorsolateral prefrontal and fusiform regions as well as in the left putamen. By contrast, correct recognition of previously learned objects (R judgments) produced activation in left superior frontal, bilateral…

This study was designed to determine whether the effectiveness of stimulus intensity declines with age. The results indicated that infants 10 weeks and younger responded on the basis of size, while infants between 10 and 24 weeks looked more at a bull's-eye than at a striped pattern regardless of size. (JMB)

Three experiments investigated the ability of seven-month-olds to categorize the facial expressions of happiness, fear, and surprise, which were depicted by degrees of intensity. Happiness could be distinguished in mild and extreme forms, but fear was difficult to discriminate from happiness or surprise. (SKC)

Studied 2 1/2- to 6-year-old children's judgments of age category and relative age of stimulus faces, using a paired-comparison task. Faces showed variations in craniofacial profile shape, frontal face feature vertical placement, and facial wrinkling. (Author/NH)

In a study involving 48 kindergarten children, tests using tachistoscopic exposures, divided form boards, and grooved pegboards, all showed significant correlations with readiness. Results of the Auditory-Visual Integration Test were not significant at the kindergarten level. Findings suggest that individuals with good perceptual skills are likely…