Studying within-person variability in children's behavior is frequently hindered by challenges collecting repeated observations. This study used wearable accelerometers to collect an intensive time series (2.7 million observations) of young children's movement at school (N = 62, M[subscript age] = 4.5 years, 54% male, 74% Non-Hispanic White) in…

Adversity-exposed youth tend to score lower on cognitive tests. However, the hidden talents approach proposes some abilities are enhanced by adversity, especially under ecologically relevant conditions. Two versions of an attention-shifting and working memory updating task--one abstract, one ecological--were administered to 618 youth (M[subscript…

This research investigated whether delayed school entry was associated with higher achievement in national tests of reading and numeracy in Grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 (n = 2,823). Delayed entry was related to advantages in reading (0.14 SD) and numeracy (0.08 SD) at Grade 3, although little variance was explained (1%-2%). This slight advantage…

Individual differences in infant attention are theorized to reflect the speed of information processing and are related to later cognitive abilities (i.e., memory, language, and intelligence). This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of infant attention and early childhood executive function (EF; e.g., working memory,…

Data obtained from a group of infants ranging in age from four to seven months did not support the existence of attentional inertia in this age range. (MP)

Infant joint attention has been observed to be related to social-emotional outcomes in at-risk children. To address whether this relation is also evident in typically developing children, 52 children were tested at 12, 15, 24, and 30 months to examine associations between infant joint attention and social outcomes. Twelve-month initiating and…

Determines whether an averaged evoked potential technique using a random-v-repetitive presentation mode could be used to study infant auditory discrimination. Results showed a main effect of presentation mode with shorter latency for random v repetitive. The shortest onset latency was for random stimulus at the fast rate. (Author/DB)

This study investigated the common practice in infant research of eliminating from reported data large numbers of subjects who prove uncooperative (sleepy, fatigued, fussy) during the experiment. It was suggested that these excluded infants constitute a special class of subjects and that the inclusion of their data would greatly alter the research…

Second grade children, divided into high and low achievement groups, were tested on a visual vigilance task in which stimuli occurred 24 times in 30 minutes. High achievers responded correctly more often. (ST)

Groups of 7 1/2-month-old infants heard 1 of 8 episodes consisting of no, slight, moderate, or large discrepancy between a habituated standard and a transformed auditory stimulus. Patterns of cardiac deceleration supported the hypothesis that attentiveness is an inverted-U function of the degree of discrepancy between stimulus event and schema.…

Results support the contention that infant attention should be divided into separate attention-getting and attention-holding processes. (Author)

Uses the habituation paradigm to investigate 3-month-old infants' abilities to recognize and discriminate among the faces of strangers. Infants consistently discriminated between photographs of faces following extensive exposure to one, and recognized something about the face they saw during habituation. Results suggest that similarity influences…

Looking times of 96 preschoolers were recorded as they were habituated on slides of sex-typed toys. After habituation, subjects were shown a test series of 24 slides. (Author/SS)