Mental representation of absent objects and events is a major cognitive achievement. Research is presented that explores how toddlers (2- to 3-year-old children) search for hidden objects and understand out-of-sight events. Younger children fail to use visually obvious cues, such as a barrier that blocks a moving object's path. Spatiotemporal information provided by movement cues directly conne...

PURPOSE The proliferation of new communication technologies and capabilities has prompted concern about driving safety. This concern is particularly acute for inexperienced adolescent drivers. In addition to being early adopters of technology, many adolescents have not achieved the degree of automaticity in driving that characterizes experienced adults. Consequently, distractions may be more pr...

Sixty-three mother-toddler dyads took part in a 6-month prospective study that examined how differences in the frequency and nature of early mother-toddler conflict related to individual differences in children's subsequent socioemotional development. When the children were 30 months, mothers and children participated in a series of laboratory tasks and in a 1.5-hr unstructured home observation...

Review of the cycloplegic refractions of all children who were first examined at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston between 1968 and 1978 revealed that 281 children between the ages of 0 and 9.5 years had astigmatism of 1 diopter (D) or greater but no other ophthalmological or neurological problems. In the 85 children under 3.5 years of age, against-the-rule astigmatism was 2.5 times ...

Any theory of language must account for how children learn verbs, the gateway to grammar. Yet verbs can be difficult to learn. Building on Gentner's 'natural partitions hypothesis' we suggest that, to learn a verb, infants must conceptualize components of events and map verbs in the ambient language onto those components. Although toddlers detect and categorize at least some of the conceptual u...

Early experience likely plays an important role in the development of the ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion. We posited that compared to children reared with their biological families (n=72), abandoned children being reared in institutions (n=39) should demonstrate impairments in this ability. The visual paired comparison procedure was utilized to assess the abilities of 13-...

The relation between parenting styles and adolescent outcomes was analyzed in a sample of 1,198 15-18-year-old Brazilians. The adolescents were classified into 1 of 4 groups (Authoritative, Authoritarian, Indulgent, and Neglectful) on the basis of their own ratings of their parents on two dimensions: Acceptance/ Involvement and Strictness/Imposition. The adolescents were then contrasted along t...

Findings on the perceptual reorganization of lexical tones are mixed. Some studies report good tone discrimination abilities for all tested age groups, others report decreased or enhanced discrimination with increasing age, and still others report Ushaped developmental curves. Since prior studies have used a wide range of contrasts and experimental procedures, it is unclear how specific task re...

The paper is motivated by the hypothesis that the ideas of societal development and modernity have been widely disseminated and have been especially important in changing family life in much of the world. Based on focus group and survey data collected among urban and rural teenagers in Argentina in 2003-2004, we evaluate the extent they understand and adhere to the ideas of centuries of develop...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the feasibility and potential efficacy of an age-appropriate additional parenting intervention for very preterm born toddlers. STUDY DESIGN In a randomized controlled pilot study, 60 of 94 eligible very preterm born children who had received a responsive parenting intervention in their first year were randomized to usual care or the additional intervention, consisting of...