Young children's growing access to touchscreen technology represents one of many contextual factors that may influence development. The focus of the current study was the impact of traditional versus electronic drawing materials on the quality of children's drawings during the preschool years. Young children (2-5 years, N = 73) and a comparison…

Prospective motor control, a key element of action planning, is the ability to adjust one's actions with respect to task demands and action goals in an anticipatory manner. The current study investigates whether 14-month-olds can prospectively control their reaching actions based on the difficulty of the subsequent action. We used a reach-to-place…

Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation…

Fine motor skills enable children to make precise and coordinated movements with their hands and support their ability to engage in everyday activities and learning experiences. In a longitudinal study of 1,058 4-year-old children in rural Pakistan (n = 488 girls), we examined how prior and concurrent levels of home stimulation relate to change in…

Some grips on the handle of a tool can be planned on the basis of information directly available in the scene. Other grips, however, must be planned on the basis of the final position of the hand. "End-state comfort" grips require an awkward or uncomfortable initial grip so as to later implement the action comfortably and efficiently.…

To benefit from the exploration of their bodies and their physical and social environments, infants need to detect sensorimotor contingencies linking their actions to sensory feedback. This ability, which seems to be present in babies from birth and even in utero, has been widely used by researchers in their study of early development. However, a…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6…

Studies conducted in Western countries document the special role of mother--infant face-to-face exchanges for early emotional development including social smiling. A few cross-cultural studies have shown that the Western pattern of face-to-face communication is absent in traditional rural cultures, without identifying other processes that promote…

The embodied-cognition approach views cognition and language as grounded in daily sensorimotor child-environment interactions. Therefore, the attainment of motor milestones is expected to play a role in cognitive-linguistic development. Early attainment of unsupported sitting and independent walking indeed predict better spatial cognition and…

During the first year of life, infants possess some of the key social--cognitive abilities required for success in a social world: Infants interpret others' actions in terms of their intentions and can use this understanding prospectively to generate predictions about others' behavior. Exactly how these foundational abilities develop is currently…

This experiment examined how multiple planning constraints affect grasp posture planning in 6- to 10-year-old children (n = 16 in each group) by manipulating the intended object end-orientation (left end-down, right end-down) and initial precision demands (standard, initial precision) of a bar transport task. Results indicated that grasp posture…

Despite the importance of handwriting for school readiness and early academic progress, prior research on the development of handwriting has focused primarily on the product rather than the process by which young children write letters. In contrast, in the present work, early handwriting is viewed as involving a suite of perceptual, motor, and…

Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between handedness and language in development. However, traditional handedness studies using single age groups, small samples, or too few measurement time points have not capitalized on individual variability and may have masked 2 recently identified patterns in infants: those with a…

Using the concepts of sensory and affective experience, this work relates the concepts of socialization and cognitive development to the embodiment of gender in the human infant. Evidence obtained from biweekly observations from 30 children and their mothers observed from age 3 months to age 12 months revealed measurable sex-related differences in…