How animals gain information from attending to the behavior of others has been widely studied, driven partly by the importance of referential pointing in human cognitive development [1-4], but species differences in reading human social cues remain unexplained. One explanation is that this capacity evolved during domestication [5, 6], but it may be that only those animals able to interpret huma...

Childhood is a stage of life that is filled with potential for development, and the early years of childhood see immense physical changes in growth; mastery over body functions like movement; the acquisition of language and cognitive development to understand their own and others' thinking and reasoning; and the psychosocial development of trust in the world, comfort in the care they receive fr...

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of acting on cognition and perception have been limi...

Infants and young children with Down syndrome can be engaging and affectionate. It seems that in the early months of life their personal relations may be relatively 'spared' the effects of limitations in their capacities for information-processing. Yet how far is this the case as development proceeds? In this paper we discuss some ways in which social and cognitive development interact and mutu...

In this article an overview is given of traditional methodological approaches to stagewise cognitive developmental research. These approaches are evaluated and integrated on the basis of catastrophe theory. In particular, catastrophe theory specifies a set of common criteria for testing the discontinuity hypothesis proposed by Piaget. Separate criteria correspond to distinct methods used in cog...

We make use of a new data resource--merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002--to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development. Using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed effects models, we find that the effects of early health on cognitive development are essentially constant through the school career; that these effects...

The current studies provide an experimental, rather than correlational, method for testing hypotheses about the role of executive function (EF) in conceptual development. Previous research has established that adults' tendency to deploy EF can be temporarily diminished by use. Exercising self-control in one context decreases adults' performance on other EF demanding tasks immediately thereafter...

Studies of cognitive development in human infants have relied almost entirely on descriptive data at the behavioral level - the age at which a particular ability emerges. The underlying mechanisms of cognitive development remain largely unknown, despite attempts to correlate behavioral states with brain states. We argue that research on cognitive development must focus on theories of learning, ...

Studying how children and adults explain magic tricks can reveal developmental differences in cognition. We showed 167 children (aged 4-13 years) a video of a magician making a pen vanish and asked them to explain the trick. Although most tried to explain the secret, none of them correctly identified it. The younger children provided more supernatural interpretations and more often took the mag...