Evaluated statistically the effect of intranatal and early postnatal period factors on mental development of very low-birth-weight infants. Covariance structure analysis revealed direct influence of birth weight and gestational age in weeks on mental development at age 1, and of opthalmological aberrations and respirator disorder on mental…

Longitudinal study examined 6-year-olds' performance in tasks involving a protagonist with partial information about an object or a person. Found that children who demonstrated some understanding of the consequences of limited information access often made other errors. Despite intervening additions of contextual support and clarifications, the…

Evaluated infants' ability to form new object categories based on either visual or naming information at 16 and 20 months using an object manipulation task. Found that infants at both ages showed evidence of using visual information to categorize the objects. Only 20-month-olds used naming information. Found a correlation between vocabulary size…

Twenty-one children (ages 4-11) prelingually deaf and orally trained, were tested with verbal and nonverbal versions of a false-belief task. Children did not perform above chance in the verbal task. The nonverbal task significantly facilitated performance, however, only older children performed above change in the nonverbal false-belief tests.…

Details meta-analysis of 58 intervention studies related to higher-order processing (i.e., problem solving) for adolescents with learning disabilities. Discusses factors that increased effect sizes: (1) measures of metacognition and text understanding; (2) instruction including advanced organizers, new skills, and extended practice; and (3)…

Research on the effects of home computer use on children's development indicates that: computer access increases total time spent with the television or computer rather than other activities; computer games can build computer literacy; home computer use slightly increases academic performance; increased Internet use may increase loneliness and…

Proposes a methodology for collaborative innovation, which leads to cognitive development. Topics include a systems approach to lifelong learning; distributed cognition versus collaborative innovation activities; motivation for lifelong learning; creativity and interaction; the role of the Internet; and fuzzy set theory and assessment of cognitive…

Investigated the development of individual style in 3- to 10-year-old children's drawings. Assessed about one-third of children as having distinctive styles; these children were most frequently younger and showed higher aesthetic and creativity ratings in their drawings. Considered the probable sequence in children's development of artistic style.…

Investigated in 6 experiments how 4.5-month-old infants' perception of a display is affected by an immediate prior experience with an object similar to part of the test display. Found that infants' use of a prior experience is disrupted by changes in the features of the object, but not by change in its spatial orientation. (JPB)

Argues for an informational processing explanation for young infants' ability to use featural cues to differentiate objects, centering on the development of infants' ability to integrate both featural and object information. Considers information processing propositions and evidence on object segregation. (JPB)

Discusses connections between infants' use of object knowledge in recognition to computational, psychophysical, and neurophysiological research on adult perceptual segmentation and grouping. Considers these connections through a framework of the tasks and information involved in adult object segregation, and interprets Needham's results in this…

Discusses responses to Needham's research on infants' use of featural, physical and experiential information to segregate displays. Considers characterization of different kinds of information infants use when segregating objects. Discusses relations between processes underlying object segregation. Considers the roles of visual versus linguistic…

Tested in three experiments hypothesis that coordinating saying number-words and pointing to each object to count requires use of the central executive and that cost of coordination decreases with age. Found that for 5- and 9-year-olds and adults, manipulating difficulty of each component affected counting performance but did not make coordination…

Examined in 4 experiments 3- and 4-year-olds' ability to communicate about containment and proximity relations. Found that when describing where a toy mouse was hidden, children were more likely to successfully disambiguate a small landmark when it was in, rather than next to, the large landmark. Three-year-olds initiated searches faster when the…

Subjects with autism (n=36) were assigned a simple "reach, grasp, and place" task. Comparison with nonautistic children who had mental retardation and younger normally developing children found that the autistic subjects had problems in executing goal-directed motor acts even in very simple situations, suggesting an independent and marked…