Maintains that McGraw conducted a more complex analysis of neurobehavior than acknowledged by those characterizing her position as maturationist; that she advanced a unique analysis of brain development and consciousness, singling out the reciprocal relationship between neural growth processes and early experience; and that her studies of the role…

Presents 30 suggestions for preventing behavior problems among infants and toddlers in child care settings. The suggestions are in four areas: (1) environment; (2) caregiver style; (3) organization and routines; and (4) child to child: as situations happen. (KB)

Temperament development was studied in 39 full-term small-for-gestational-age infants and 30 full-term appropriate-for-gestational-age infants. Temperament was measured at 4, 8, and 12 months of age using a behavioral assessment procedure and questionnaire ratings. Findings indicated that restricted fetal growth negatively affects infant…

Two experiments investigated infants' sensitivity to amount of continuous quantity and to changes in amount of continuous quantity. Found that 6-month-olds looked significantly longer at a novel quantity than at the familiar quantity. Nine-month-olds looked significantly longer at an impossible event than at a possible event. Findings question…

Two experiments examined memory of 7-month-olds after 2-week retention interval for passages of two Mozart movements heard daily for 2 weeks. Results suggested that the infants retained familiarized music in long-term memory and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical…

Proposes that vocal communion between infant and caregiver supports infants' language acquisition and connectedness with caregivers. Recommends research to determine whether social behaviors such as joint attention and vocal imitation are functionally related to language learning or are only symptomatic of a survival-centered caregiving…

Three experiments examined vision's role in infants' grasping of horizontally and vertically oriented rods. Found that infants differentially oriented their hand regardless of lighting and similar to control conditions where they could see rod and hand throughout reach. Findings suggest that infants may use current sight of object's orientation or…

Examined maternal care and infant attachment security in a sample from the United States (Colorado) and one from Colombia. Found that maternal sensitivity and infant security were significantly associated in both samples. Identified six common and two noncommon domains (one per sample) of caregiving; associations between domains of maternal…

Maintains that advances in the literature on perception-action development suggests that tool use may be a more continuous developmental achievement than previously believed. Suggests new research directions, including efforts to investigate the processes by which children detect and relate affordances between objects, coordinate spatial frames of…

Observed weekly 13 infants from 1 to 6 months of age to determine when they produced different types of smiling and other facial expressions. Found that the cheek-raise and open-mouth dimensions of smiling appear to be associated with, respectively, amplification of processes of sharing positive affect and of visual engagement present to a lesser…

This study examined the cognitive and motor functioning of 52 survivors of neonatal extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) at age 5. Ten percent were diagnosed with mental retardation, while an additional 12 percent presented other disabilities. A common pattern of specific vulnerabilities in cognitive, gross motor, fine motor, and motor…

This research unites traditionally disparate developmental domains--cognition and locomotion--to examine the classic cognitive issue of the development of inhibition in infancy. In 2 locomotor A-not-B tasks, 13-month-old walking infants inhibited a prepotent response under low task demands (walking on flat ground), but perseverated under increased…

To examine the development of triplets, 23 sets of triplets were matched with 23 sets of twins and 23 singletons (N138). Maternal sensitivity was observed at newborn, 3, 6, and 12 months, and infants' cognitive and symbolic skills at 1 year. Triplets received lower maternal sensitivity across infancy and exhibited poorer cognitive competencies…

According to this author, when parents provide competent daily care, they are teaching infants what love and trust are. All the daily routines parents perform, including feeding, cleaning up, diapering, undressing, dressing and settling into sleep, help provide infants with emotional comfort as well as the courage to learn. This article also…

Recent years have seen the emergence of accounts of the origins of the Disorganized attachment relationship in early mother-infant interaction, each building on the pioneering work of Main and Hesse--dysfunctional emotional processes figure prominently in all these accounts. This paper applies a framework based on two complementary theories of…