Three studies examined how reducing the executive function demands of a measure of strategic deception, the windows task, would affect 3-year-olds' performance. Findings demonstrated that providing an artificial response medium, even in the presence of an opponent, and having children play in partnership enabled them to adopt a successful…

Jim McKenzie's reply to the author's paper suggests that there are substantial areas of disagreement between US. McKenzie appears to agree with the central philosophical point that the author wished to make, that internal representationalism is incoherent. The author's target was that set of doctrines known as "cognitivism", which is based on the…

Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative…

Two studies address the sequence of understandings evident in preschoolers' developing theory of mind. The first, preliminary study provides a meta-analysis of research comparing different types of mental state understandings (e.g., desires vs. beliefs, ignorance vs. false belief). The second, primary study tests a theory-of-mind scale for…

In 4 experiments 120 three-to four-year-old non readers were asked the identity of a symbolic representation as it appeared with different objects. Consistent with Bialystok (2000), many children judged the identity of written words to vary according to the object with which they appeared but few made such errors with recognizable pictures.…

This research explored the development of one insight about the mind, namely, the belief that people's trains of thought differ even when they see the same stimulus. In Study 1, 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults heard stories about characters who saw the same object. Although the older groups predicted the object would trigger different trains…

Despite a large body of research demonstrating the kinds of categories to which infants respond, few studies have directly assessed how infants' categorization unfolds over time. Four experiments used a visual familiarization task to evaluate 10-month-old infants' (N=98) learning of exemplars characterized by commonalities in appearance or…

This paper explores the scientific evidence that has been gathered on the contributions and benefits of physical education and sport (PES) in schools for both children and for educational systems. Research evidence is presented in terms of children's development in a number of domains: physical, lifestyle, affective, social, and cognitive. The…

This study describes how medical and nursing students develop their conceptions and understanding of science during 3 years of study at the academic level. The point of departure is the students' commonsense conceptions at the start of the undergraduate programme, which are seen as alternative ways of thinking to the more theoretical explanatory…

Executive functions have been defined in the neuropsychological literature as those cognitive processes that underlie future-oriented, goal-directed behavior such as planning, working memory, inhibition, and self-monitoring. Piaget's final stage of cognitive development, formal operations, involves a systematic approach to problem solving that…

Historically, developmental psychology has been split into the areas of social development and cognitive development, with the cognitive area most recently dominating the field. Nevertheless, basic questions about development often require more integrative approaches, cutting across social and cognitive areas, while taking advantage of recent…

The premise of this article is that the study of representation is valuable and important for mathematics and science students. Learning about representation should go beyond learning specific, sanctioned representations emphasized in standard curricula (graphs, tables, etc.) to include principles and design strategies that apply to any scientific…

Although it is now well established that object concepts are situated within broader systems of theoretical knowledge, it is less clear how theories influence the use of object concepts at various points throughout the continuum of expertise. Two studies were conducted to investigate the impact of specific theories (concerning dinosaurs) and…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether very young children have difficulty with dual representations when change in perspective has been eliminated, that is, the task no longer requires transfer between a traversable and surveyable array. In a preliminary experiment children 30 and 36 months of age attempted to transfer an action…

Sobel and Lillard (2001 ) demonstrated that 4-year-olds' understanding of the role that the mind plays in pretending improved when children were asked questions in a fantasy context. The present study investigated whether this fantasy effect was motivated by children recognizing that fantasy contains violations of real-world causal structure. In…