Executive function (EF) plays a foundational role in development. A brain-based model of EF development is probed for the experiences that strengthen EF in the dimensional change card sort task in which children sort cards by one rule and then are asked to switch to another. Three-year-olds perseverate on the first rule, failing the task, whereas…

Educators interact with more than 4 million infants and toddlers each week in the United States and can provide positive, nurturing experiences that enhance development. Tragically, the infant-toddler workforce in the United States often lacks the support and resources necessary to support their work. These urgent needs require comprehensive…

Research linking high-quality child care programs and children's cognitive development has contributed to the growing popularity of child care quality benchmarking efforts such as quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS). Consequently, there has been an increased interest in and a need for approaches to identifying thresholds, or cutpoints,…

Symbolic play is a powerful vehicle for supporting emotional development and communication. It embraces all developmental capacities. This article describes how symbols are formed and how emotional themes are symbolized whereby children reveal their understanding of the world, their feelings and relationships, and how they see themselves in the…

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of "proactive helping" are an important and possibly human-specific form of…

Although labeling improves executive function (EF) performance in children older than 3 years, the results from studies with younger children have been equivocal. In the current study, we assessed performance in a computerized multistep multilocation search task with older 2-year-olds. The correct search location was either (a) not marked by a…

Increasing working memory (WM) capacity is often cited as a major influence on children's development and yet WM capacity is difficult to examine independently of long-term knowledge. A computational model of children's nonword repetition (NWR) performance is presented that independently manipulates long-term knowledge and WM capacity to determine…

Two studies, an experimental category learning task and a computational simulation, examined how sequencing training instances to maximize comparison and memory affects category learning. In Study 1, 2-year-old children learned color categories with three training conditions that varied in how categories were distributed throughout training and…

Reports four studies investigating very young children's understanding of two kinds of symbolic stimuli--scale models and pictures. The data indicate that 2.5-year-old children have difficulty understanding scale models as symbols but can understand pictures as symbols. Results suggest that experience with a symbolic medium they understand can…

Toddlers' symbolic understanding of iconic models was assessed through 2 comprehension-based tasks: 1 based on looking and 1 requiring manual selection of the target object. Toddlers received either iconic models or photographs of models as the symbolic referent. Overall, 18-month-olds performed poorly, and both 22- and 26-month-olds performed…

Presents emergentist coalition theory of language development characterizing lexical acquisition as the emergent product of cognitive constraints, social-pragmatic factors, and global attentional mechanisms. Details 12 experiments with 12- to 25-month-olds using the development of reference as test case of the theory. Presents evidence that…

Analyzed 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds' problem solving and learning. Found that changes in toddlers' strategies could be assessed reliably on a trial-by-trial basis, that changes followed the basic form predicted by the overlapping waves model, and that analyses could reveal information about the qualitative and quantitative aspects of their learning.…

Aims: To compare siblings of children with autism (SIBS-A) and siblings of children with typical development (SIBS-TD) at 4 and 14 months of age. Methods: At 4 months, mother-infant interactional synchrony during free play, infant gaze and affect during the still-face paradigm, and infant responsiveness to a name-calling paradigm were examined (n…

Summarizes research findings that challenge long-standing theories of infant cognition and motor development and proposes alternative theoretical models to describe skill acquisition during the first several years of life. Findings are discussed with respect to research in the area of infant speech physiology and production. (Author/CR)

This resource for parents and other caretakers to use with infants from 8 to 18 months provides a synthesis of research on early brain development and objective-oriented instruction as the basis for activities that promote intellectual development. Part 1 of the book provides an overview of early development, discusses general ways of enhancing…