Assesses the effect of delay between an event and new postevent information related to it in six-month-old infants' memory. Three phenomena were studied: memory impairment, memory facilitation, and categorization. Suggests that postevent information has different qualitative effects depending on its timing, and provides a basis for understanding…

Discusses how daily routines in early childhood and primary grade settings can assist young children's developing understanding of time. Notes adaptable activities, including tracking weather, keeping records, talking about activities, creating time lines, celebrating personal milestones, and recording events and changes. Lists ways to integrate…

Three studies explored children's distinctions between mental and bodily reactions to contamination. Found that children distinguished reactions mediated by representations from those mediated by physical interactions. Data suggested that preschoolers distinguished between physical and mental reactions to contamination but had a poor understanding…

Examines young children's responses to and understanding of death. Discusses children's concepts of death; how their grief process differs from that of adults; stages of grief; factors affecting grief responses; acceptance of children's grief response; support for grieving children, especially funeral services and counseling; and preparing and…

Suggests that Greenberg's challenge to the centrality of object permanence in developmental thinking reveals that developmentalists' theories about childhood speak about their own self-images. Notes that developmentalists have been guilty of not only the object permanence fallacy but also the genetic fallacy, or the mistaken belief that describing…

Two experiments compared preschoolers' awareness of knowledge transitions involving behavioral changes to those involving vocabulary or general knowledge changes. Found that children tended to report they had learned something new when novel information was behavioral (e.g., counting in Japanese) and tended to claim prior knowledge when the novel…

Three studies of how workers construct knowledge associated with vocational practice were examined within a framework classifying dispositions as interest, attitudes, and values. Findings suggest that dispositions are rooted in individual history and participation in communities of practice and that consideration of how cognitive structures…

Notes two faulty aspects of the Reznick et al., twin study (PS 526 688): the expressive language measure at 14 months, which has practically no spread of item difficulty, as well as measures included to assess specific cognitive characteristics; and the notion of infant transition as it affects interpretation of the results. (HTH)

Two studies investigated development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. Results indicated that 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes in line drawings, while 12- and 15-month-olds did not respond differentially. In condition using photographs, only 18-month-olds had reliable…

Three experiments investigated effects of complexity on 2- to 6-year-olds' understanding of a beam balance. Found that 2- to 4-year-olds succeeded on problems that entailed binary relations, but 5- and 6-year-olds also succeeded on problems that entailed ternary relations. Ternary relations tasks from other domains (transitivity and class…

Presents implications for consideration by community, parents, educators, and policymakers if guided by the recommendations of the final report on the "Early Years Study" by McCain and Mustard. Cautions against an overemphasis on brain development during the early years and against viewing children as capital for social policy purposes.…

This study examined preschoolers' performance on an observation task and a search task involving the invisible displacement of an object. Findings indicated that in the observation task, there was significantly longer looking to impossible than to possible outcomes among all children. Most 3-year-olds, but significantly fewer 2.5-year-olds,…

Examined the effect of experience on children's use of video-presented information. Found that after seeing themselves "live" on their family television for 2 weeks, 2-year-olds reliably used a live video presentation of an adult hiding a toy to find the toy in an object-retrieval task. Most also transferred what they learned to a task…

Nine experiments examined 6- to 10-month-olds' formation of an abstract category representation for "between." Findings indicated that older, but not younger infants, could form an abstract category representation for "between" when performing in an object-variation version of the between categorization task. Six- to…

An ecological method was used to assess the patterns of goal-directed behaviors of eight children with autism and eight chronological and mental age comparable children with Down syndrome. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative behavior coding indicated that children with autism exhibited shorter and less overlapping goal-directed behaviors,…