Children are unique humans and experience varied development even though they are of the same gene or the same sex but grow and develop according to their respective characteristics. Of course, this condition also demands adjustments in providing appropriate and varied stimuli and responses. This study aims to observe the growth and development of…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

Designing instruments for children and youth that result in reliable and valid data requires consideration beyond calculating grade-level equivalence of the text. Very little methodological research has been conducted on the survey response processes of children and youth and there are no comprehensive guidelines informing instrument development…

This study investigated the cognitive effect of a unified flag football program in young adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). Twelve participants practiced football drills with their typical peers for 50 min each session, twice a week for 15 weeks. Measures of three aspects of executive functions (e.g., verbal working memory, measured as…

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a noninvasive neuroimaging technique that could be uniquely effective for investigating cortical function in human infants. However, prior efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of aligning arrays of fNIRS optodes placed on the scalp to anatomical or functional regions of underlying cortex.…

Maternal responsive-didactic caregiving (RDC) and infant advanced object play were investigated in a sample of 400 mothers and their 10-month-old infants during video-recorded semi-structured play interactions. Three maternal behaviours: contingent response, cognitively stimulating language and autonomy-promoting speech were coded and infant…

Although some evidence indicates that even very young children engage in rudimentary forms of strategic behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that uncertainty monitoring underlies such behaviors. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children ("N" = 88) completed a perceptual…

The first 1,000 days of life are a critical window of vulnerability to exposure to socioeconomic and health challenges (i.e. poverty/undernutrition). The Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project has been established to deliver longitudinal measures of brain development from 0 to 24 months in UK and Gambian infants and to assess the impact…

It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former,…

The provision of reinforcement to increase desired behaviors is a crucial element of behavior analytic intervention for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Formal preference assessments, like the multiple stimulus without replacement procedure (MSWO), are often used to determine reinforcers used during intervention. While…

This prospective study of the FIRST WORDS® Project examined restricted and repetitive behaviors in a sample of 55 toddlers at a mean age of 20 months who were later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Restricted and repetitive behaviors were coded using the Repetitive Movement and Restricted Interest Scales in two video-recorded observation…

In adults, most cognitive and emotional self-regulation is carried out by a network of brain regions, including the anterior cingulate, insula, and areas of the basal ganglia, related to executive attention. We propose that during infancy, control systems depend primarily upon a brain network involved in orienting to sensory events that includes…

Behavioral research suggests that two cognitive systems are at the foundations of numerical thinking: one for representing 1-3 objects in parallel and one for representing and comparing large, approximate numerical magnitudes. We tested for dissociable neural signatures of these systems in preverbal infants by recording event-related potentials…

This paper presents an autobiographical narrative of two aspects of my history; two events that permeated my moral consciousness and influenced my political development and a sequence of changes in my dominant theoretical and epistemological perspectives. The two events were, as a teenager, the intense experience of briefly witnessing Apartheid…

Two studies using an ABA design examined the Extinction and renewal of conditioned barpress suppression. Following lights-off and foot shock pairings in Context A, rats were placed in Context B and were given either a standard counterconditioning procedure where the lights-off CS was paired with a novel food US delivered freely or a modified…