There are two different conceptions of the innate basis for numerical abilities. On the one hand, it is claimed that infants possess a "number module" that enables them to construct concepts of the exact numerosities of sets upon which arithmetic develops (e.g. Butterworth, 1999 ; Gelman & Gallistel, 1978). On the other hand, it has been proposed…

We examined the influence of prior exposure to specific animal properties on 15-month-old infants' inductive generalization. Using picture books, 29 infants were trained on properties linked in a congruent or incongruent manner with four animal categories. A generalized imitation task was then administered to assess patterns of property extension…

Studies of the development of mental rotation have yielded conflicting results, apparently because different mental rotation tasks draw on different cognitive abilities. Children may compare two stimuli at different orientations without mental rotation if the stimuli contain orientation-free features. Two groups of children (78 6-year-olds and 92…

This experiment used a modified go/no-go paradigm to investigate the processes by which response inhibition becomes more efficient during mid-childhood. The novel task, which measured trials on which a response was initiated but not completed, was sensitive to developmental changes in response inhibition. The effect of inducing time pressure by…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

Darwin (1871) noted that the human musical faculty "must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed". Indeed, previous research with human infants and young children has revealed that we are born with variable musical capabilities. Here, the adaptive purpose served by these differing capabilities is discussed with reference to…

The choice to delay gratification, opting for a greater reward later instead of a smaller reward now, has been used as a measure of preschoolers' ability to make future-oriented decisions. The present studies investigated to what extent these choice tasks reflect children's ability to make choices in favour of their future self. In Experiment 1,…

We investigated how 14-month-old infants know what others know. In two studies, an infant played with each of two objects in turn while an experimenter was present. Then the experimenter left the room, and the infant played with a third object with an assistant. The experimenter returned, faced all three objects, and said excitedly "Look! Can you…

Previous research suggests that by 4 months of age infants use the eye gaze of adults to guide their attention and facilitate processing of environmental information. Here we address the question of how infants process the relation between another person and an external object. We applied an ERP paradigm to investigate the neural processes…

In a series of three experiments, we investigated the development of children's understanding of the similarities between photographs and their referents. Based on prior work on the development of analogical understanding (e.g. Gentner & Rattermann, 1991), we suggest that the appreciation of this relation involves multiple levels. Photographs…

Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding.…

How do infants identify the psychological actors in their environments? Three groups of 12-month-old infants were tested for their willingness to encode a simple approach behavior as goal-directed as a function of whether it was performed by (1) a human hand, (2) a morphologically unfamiliar green object that interacted with a confederate and…

Some recent publications that explore the foundations of early language development are reviewed in this article. The review adopts the pivotal idea that infants' advancements are helped by the existence of different types of biases. The infant's discovery of the phonological properties of the language of the environment, as well as their learning…

Two alternative accounts have been proposed to explain the role of gestures in thinking and speaking. The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) claims that gestures are important for the conceptual packaging of information before it is coded into a linguistic form for speech. The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996)…

Cardiac disease is the most common congenital defect in children, affecting between 3 and 10 in every 1000 live births. While significant advances in medical and surgical management have resulted in increasing numbers of survivors, it is also recognized that there is a growing population of children living with neurological impairment and lowered…