Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

Various developmental studies have demonstrated that implied object weight is a key variable in children's interpretations of motion, such as predicting the objects' speeds. An additional bias in predictions of object motion is representational momentum (RM), where objects are anticipated to be found in a location farther along in the direction of…

This report investigates tool learning and its relations to executive functions (EFs) in toddlers. In Study 1 (N = 93), 18-, 20-, 22-, and 24-month-old children learned equally well to choose a correct tool from observation, whereas performance based on feedback improved with age. Knowledge transfer showed significant progress after 22 months of…

For children with moderate or severe cerebral palsy (CP), a foundational early goal is independent sitting. Sitting offers additional opportunities for object exploration, play and social engagement. The achievement of sitting coincides with important milestones in other developmental areas, such as social engagement with others, understanding of…

When children use objects like adults, are they simply tracking regularities in others' object use, or are they demonstrating a normatively defined awareness that there are right and wrong ways to act? This study provides the first evidence for the latter possibility. Young 2- and 3-year-olds (n = 32) learned functions of 6 artifacts, both…

From the age of 2.5, children use social information to rapidly form enduring function-based artifact categories. The present study asked whether even younger children likewise constrain their use of objects according to teleo-functional beliefs that artifacts are "for" particular purposes, or whether they use objects as means to any desired end.…

Compared the impact of a small box emitting sounds in response to nearby motion introduced into an infant/toddler and a preschool classroom to illustrate qualitative differences in how children of different ages recognize the same objects as mediating devices for activity. Found that the box became a social object for infants/toddlers and part of…

The present study assessed mastery behaviors in toddlers with physical impairment during object and social play interaction with their parents. Poor mastery motivation in object play of children with physical impairments has been attributed to difficulty in independently structuring tasks, limited experience in play effectiveness, and frequent…