The possibilities for building and nourishing connections among the social, cultural, neuroscientific, biological, and cognitive sciences in the service of understanding children and their development are tremendously exciting. Crossing, and integrating across, disciplinary boundaries, especially those disciplines relating to biology/neuroscience,…

The marriage of evolution and development to produce the new discipline "evo-devo" in biology is situated in the general history of evolutionary biology, and its significance for developmental cognitive science is discussed. The discovery and description of the highly conserved, robust and "evolvable" mechanisms that organize the vertebrate body…

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting…

Individuals with low working memory capacity (e.g. preschoolers) are more prone to goal neglect, or a failure to execute a goal even though it is understood. We examined the role of goal neglect in performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort by including 'redundant' cards that could be sorted without attending to the rules, as well as the…

The question why synaesthesia, an atypical binding within or between modalities, occurs is both enduring and important. Two explanations have been provided: (1) a congenital explanation: we are all born as synaesthetes but most of us subsequently lose the experience due to brain development; (2) a learning explanation: synaesthesia is related to…

In three experiments (N = 123; 148; 28), children observed a video in which two speakers offered alternative labels for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds endorsed the label given by a speaker who had previously labeled familiar objects accurately, rather than that given by a speaker with a history of inaccurate labeling, even…

The ability to recall contextual details associated with an event begins to develop in the first year of life, yet adult levels of recall are not reached until early adolescence. Dual-process models of memory suggest that the distinct retrieval process that supports the recall of such contextual information is recollection. In the present…

Does real time coupling between mental and physical activity early in development have functional significance? To address this question, we examined the habituation of visual attention and the subsequent response to change in two groups of 3-month-olds with different patterns of movement-attention coupling. In suppressors, the typical decrease in…

Viewing faces or bodies activates category-selective areas of visual cortex, including the fusiform face area (FFA), fusiform body area (FBA), and extrastriate body area (EBA). Here, using fMRI, we investigate the development of these areas, focusing on the right FFA and FBA. Despite the overlap of functionally defined FFA and FBA (54%-75%…

Both human infants and adult non-human primates share the capacity to track small numbers of objects across time and occlusion. The question now facing developmental and comparative psychologists is whether similar mechanisms give rise to this capacity across the two populations. Here, we explore whether non-human primates' object tracking…

It is argued that cognitive development has to be understood in the functional perspective provided by actions. Actions reflect all aspects of cognitive development including the motives of the child, the problems to be solved, and the constraints and possibilities of the child's body and sensorimotor system. Actions are directed into the future…

Twelve- and 14-month-old infants' ability to represent another person's visual perspective (Level-1 visual perspective taking) was studied in a looking-time paradigm. Fourteen-month-olds looked longer at a person reaching for and grasping a new object when the old goal-object was visible than when it was invisible to the person (but visible to the…

Young infants tend to look longer at physical events that have unexpected outcomes than those that have expected outcomes, suggesting that they have knowledge of physical principles such as numerosity and occlusion (Baillargeon & Graber, 1987; Wynn, 1992). Although infants are typically tested in the presence of a caregiver, the social component…

During the second year of life, infants exhibit a "video deficit effect." That is, they learn significantly less from a televised demonstration than they learn from a live demonstration. We predicted that repeated exposure to televised demonstrations would increase imitation from television, thereby reducing the video deficit effect. Independent…

Activity level (AL) is a highly salient feature of child behaviour that has been linked to developmental outcome. Twin studies of parent-rated, observer-rated and mechanically assessed AL in childhood find that AL is genetically influenced. Few studies, however, consider whether different methods of assessing AL have a shared genetic etiology.…