Pain is a ubiquitous feature of the human experience. This paper presents an anthropology of pain. Anthropology is defined as the cross-cultural and comparative study of human behavior. Pain can be acute and episodic, and pain can be constant and uninterrupted. Acute pain, lasting for minutes or hours, is reported at some time by virtually all adults and by most juveniles and is indicated by th...

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni -verb, nouni) where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should blo...

In a longitudinal study, infants' habituation and mothers' encouragement of attention were assessed at 5 months, and toddlers' language comprehension, language production, and pretense play and mothers' encouragement of attention were assessed at 13 months. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the unique contributions of infant habituation and maternal stimulation to toddlers' cogni...

Two-and-a-half-year-olds normally fail standard falsebelief tasks. In the classic version, children have to say where a protagonist will look for an apple that, unbeknownst to her, was moved to a new location. Children under 4 generally predict that the protagonist will look for her apple in its current location, rather than where she left it. Setoh, Scott, and Baillargeon (1) argue that young ...

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs ...

The ability to locate objects in the environment is adaptively important for mobile organisms. Research on location coding reveals that even toddlers have considerable spatial skill. Important information has been obtained using a disorientation task in which children watch a target object being hidden and are then blindfolded and rotated so they cannot track their changing relation to the targ...

Look ng tines of 3 6 children were recorded during subjectconl-rolled presentation of slides. Habituation was demonstrated over re,peated presentati. of 6 slides from a single conceptual category (e.q., animals). In an rilmediate generalization test the six habituatld sliCes were intermixed Nith 6 unfamiliar, but similar slides f -. the sale cateqor'y nd 6 slides from a novel catego.y (g., frui...

This training study investigates how children learn to refer to things unambiguously. Two hundred twenty-four children aged 2.6, 3.6, and 4.6 years were pre- and posttested for their ability to request stickers from a dense array. Between test sessions, children were assigned to a training condition in which they (a) asked for stickers from an adult, (b) responded to an adult's requests for sti...

Studies with nonhuman primates and rodents, as well as with human children, have suggested that early separations from caregivers are often associated with changes in the functioning of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. On the basis of these findings, we designed a relational intervention that was intended to normalize HPA functioning among children in foster care. This paper prese...

Leg segment rotations in human walking covary, so that the three-dimensional trajectory of temporal changes in the elevation angles lies close to a plane. Recently the role of central versus biomechanical constraints on the kinematics control of human locomotion has been questioned. Here we show, based on both modeling and experimental data, that the planar law of intersegmental coordination is...