Seven hundred seventy-nine infants were screened at 4 months of age for motor and emotional reactivity. At age 9 months, infants who showed extreme patterns of motor and negative (n = 75) or motor and positive (n = 73) reactivity and an unselected control group (n = 86) were administered the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery, and baseline…

Background: It is generally assumed that children with Down syndrome (DS) present a deficit in lexical production relative to their cognitive abilities. However, the literature on this topic has recently shown several contradictory results. In addition, most studies only consider vocabulary production in its vocal modality. However it is also…

Concept image and concept definition is an important construct in mathematics education. Its use, however, has been limited to cognitive studies. This article revisits concept image in the context of research on undergraduate students' understanding of the derivative which regards the context of learning as paramount. The literature, mainly on…

Many recent articles, research papers, and conference presentations about Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) emphasize the "extended" version of the ZPD that reflects human emotions and desires. In this essay, Michael G. Levykh expands on the extant literature on the ZPD through developing several new ideas. First, he maintains that…

Two explanations for deficits underlying autism were tested: weak central coherence (WCC) and executive dysfunction. Consistent with WCC, Happe ("British Journal of Developmental Psychology" 15 (1997) 1) found that children with autism failed to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs. In an alternate approach, we investigated whether…

Artifact knowledge requires integration of information from different areas of human commonsense knowledge--our everyday understanding of object mechanics and our everyday psychology. Here, we address the question of artifact conceptual structure, outlining evidence from tasks involving categorization, function judgments, and problem solving.

In this paper I aim to show that the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. I do this from the perspective of cognitive integration: completing a complex cognitive, or mental, task is enabled by a co-ordinated interaction between neural…

This paper inquires into the extent to which humans are specially constituted relative to other animals by their language. First a principled concept of evolutionary specialness is operationalized. Then it is agreed that humans satisfy the criteria for this sort of specialness in consequence of the kind of cultural evolution in which they have…

That competences may emerge given appropriate environmental and behavioral context is a long-standing theme in developmental research. Work in the motor domain, but also in cognitive development, has made it possible to transform this idea into a mechanistic account closely linked to empirical evidence. In dynamic systems thinking, such capacities…

Human infants imitate others' actions "rationally": they copy a demonstrator's action when that action is freely chosen, but less when it is forced by some constraint (Gergely, Bekkering & Kiraly, 2002). We investigated whether enculturated chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) also imitate rationally. Using Gergely and colleagues' (2002) basic procedure,…

Four studies are reported that employed an object location task to assess temporal-causal reasoning. In Experiments 1-3, successfully locating the object required a retrospective consideration of the order in which two events had occurred. In Experiment 1, 5- but not 4-year-olds were successful; 4-year-olds also failed to perform at above-chance…

This study was an attempt to integrate cognitive development (i.e., cognitive control) and emotional development (i.e., emotion regulation) in the first years of life. The construct of temperament was used to unify cognition and emotion because of its focus on attentional and regulatory behaviors. Children were seen at 8 months and 4 1/2-years of…

Using older adults and dual-task interference, we examined performance on two social reasoning tasks: theory of mind (ToM) tasks and versions of the deontic selection task involving social contracts and hazardous conditions. In line with performance accounts of social reasoning (Leslie, Friedman, & German, 2004), evidence from both aging and the…

The authors explore how children's play can support the development of the foundations of mathematics learning and how adults can support children's representation of--and thus the "mathematization" of--their play. The authors review research about the amount and nature of mathematics found in the free play of children. They briefly…

This 8-month qualitative study investigated 3 primary classrooms' implementation of a synthesized approach to comprehension instruction that incorporated vocabulary development, cognitive strategies, and responsive engagement. Three themes emerged, including successes and challenges in (a) the implementation of the separate components of the…