bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Corneal reflection eye‐movement recording as a measure of infant pattern perception: What do we really know?
Authors: Hainline Louise , Lemerise Elizabeth
Published: July 2011

Infra‐red corneal reflection techniques have been used for a number of years to assess infant pattern perception. The existing studies using this method have been interpreted as supporting the existence of a developmental trend in pattern scanning from narrow to more extensive pattern scanning over the first few months of life; these changes have been attributed to the development of cortical functioning. We discuss the possible sources of error in the use of these techniques with infants, and critically evaluate the conclusions that have been drawn from the existing studies. In addition to technical limitations in the early corneal reflection work, failure to take account of the infant's state of alertness may have caused younger infants to seem visually less capable than they really are. Based on this review of the existing literature and on a reanalysis of our data on scanning in early infancy (Hainline & Lemerise, 1982), we conclude that, at present, there are few data that unequivocally support the claimed developmental change in scanning extensiveness in early infancy.
Failure to distinguish between people and things in early infancy
Authors: Sylvester‐Bradley Benjamin
Published: July 2011

Whether or not babies understand the differences between people and things has been deemed crucial to psychological views of early development. However, only two studies have addressed this question empirically (Brazelton et al., 1974; Frye et al., 1983), neither of which reported statistically significant differences between the behaviours manifested by babies with a person and with a thing. Nevertheless, a number of psychologists assume in their theorizing that humans are born able to distinguish people from things (e.g. Trevarthen, 1974; Bruner, 1975). In this paper I describe a replication of the study reported by Brazelton et al. Eight 10‐week‐olds were filmed for two minutes en face with a graspable ball and 'chatting' with their mothers. Nine behaviours were coded. Results showed that babies opened their mouths and lowered their eyebrows significantly more and turned away significantly less with their mothers than with the ball. Further analysis showed that babies acted 'socially' in both conditions, suggesting that a 'sociable mood' may persist despite appropriate changes in infants' stimulus conditions. It is concluded that the ways in which infants experience their worlds cannot be generated by an inborn capacity to distinguish between people and things.
Developmental changes in four types of gesture in relation to acts and vocalizations from 10 to 21 months
Authors: Zinober Brenda , Martlew Margaret
Published: July 2011

The development of four types of gesture (instrumental, expressive, enactive and deictic) was examined in relation to acts and vocalizations in two infants over the period when they were aged 10 to 21 months. Observations were made in their homes when they were playing and reading books with their mothers. The initial predominance of acts declined while gestures increased from 10 to 18 months. The gestural types differed in their time of emergence, frequency of use and the context in which they were used. Generally, there was a progressive increase in the coordination of gestures and vocalizations but differences were found in when and how often gestural types were accompanied by vocalizations. These vocalizations showed developmental changes from babbling and proto‐words to single and then multi‐word utterances. Initially, co‐occurring gesture and vocalization expressed the same meaning but as the two modes came to be used to express diverse meanings, more complex ideas were conveyed. During the period when the number and functional flexibility of the child's words are limited, gestures play an important role in enhancing communicative effectiveness. The establishment of an integrated, plurifunctional and increasingly conventional signalling system seems to provide a supportive framework for the acquisition of linguistic signals.
Understanding the movements of objects: Early developments in spatial cognition
Authors: Sophian Catherine
Published: July 2011

What do infants understand about movements of an object from one place to another? This is a central problem in the study of early cognitive development, because a full understanding of the movement of objects presupposes representational and inferential abilities that are often considered to distinguish adult‐like intelligence from the sensorimotor intelligence of infants. The two experiments in this paper examine developments in children's understanding of visible and invisible displacements between 9 months and 30 months of age. The first focuses on 9‐ and 12‐month‐olds' understanding of single displacements. The results suggest that 9‐month‐olds can understand visible but not invisible displacements, while 12‐month‐olds understand both visible and invisible displacements. The second experiment further tests children's early understanding of visible displacements by looking at performance on spatial transposition problems. The results again support the conclusion that infants can infer invisible movements by about 1 year of age, although large improvements in performance continue to occur through the later part of the infancy period. Across both studies, consistent evidence that infants already have at least a limited understanding of the movements of objects, and that the age groups show similar patterns of performance despite large improvements in their levels of performance, points to substantial continuity in early cognitive development.
Conflict between canonicality and array‐specificity in young children's drawings
Authors: Davis Alyson
Published: July 2011

Previous research on young children's drawings has typically studied children's representation of individual objects quite separately from their representation of the spatial relationships between objects in a scene. This paper reports two experiments which explored the relationship between these two aspects of graphic representation. In particular it looks at the problem posed to children in depicting an array of familiar objects with canonical (or stereotyped) orientations which conflict with the way children typically represent within‐array spatial relationships. Four‐seven‐year‐old children were presented with two‐object arrays with one object placed behind the other and in which the orientation of each object was also varied. There were three main findings. First, children's concern to draw a familiar object in its canonical orientation tended to override their concern for depicting between‐object spatial relationships. Second, different array presentations resulted in significant differences in the number of children who drew their own view of the array. Lastly, both these findings were subject to a paradoxical U‐shaped developmental age trend.
Children's knowledge of photography: A study of the developing awareness of a representational medium
Authors: Kose Gary
Published: July 2011

This study concerns children's understanding of photographs. The findings suggest that children's comprehension of photographs is not limited to recognizing depicted content but in addition involves an awareness of the specific medium of representation. Groups of 7‐ and 11‐year‐old children were interviewed about their knowledge of photography and were asked to respond to a series of photographs. The children were selected on the basis of their experience with photography and were pre‐tested on several Piagetian tasks. The results revealed that the 7‐year‐olds showed some awareness of the photographic medium but when responding to actual photographs they tended to discuss only the depicted content. In contrast, the 11‐year‐olds showed an awareness of the way in which the photographic medium interacts with the depicted content; when responding to actual photographs these children's responses varied with different styles of photographs. Experience with photography influenced both the 7‐ and 11‐year‐olds' responses, while differences in performance on the Piagetian tasks were only associated with differences in the 11‐year‐olds' responses. These findings are discussed in terms of the importance of considering the characteristics of media in understanding children's representational abilities.
Young children's perception of danger
Authors: Grieve Robert , Williams Aileen
Published: July 2011

Accidents are the major cause of childhood mortality and morbidity in industrialized societies. To devise effective programmes of accident prevention, it is necessary to obtain some estimate of young children's ability to perceive danger. Our study describes the abilities of children aged 3 to 6 years to perceive dangers commonly involved in childhood accidents—e.g. accidental falls, accidents involving scalds and burns, cuts and lacerations, electrocution, drowning, etc. Age effects, sex differences, and socio‐economic background effects are considered in the results of two studies, which ask children to identify and recognize dangerous situations.
Black pupils' progress in secondary schools: II. Examination attainments
Authors: Maughan Barbara , Rutter Michael
Published: July 2011

This study explores the examination attainments of black pupils of West Indian origin and their white peers attending the same inner London secondary schools. At 16, black pupils were underrepresented in the highest exam pass grades, but more likely than whites to have achieved at least some graded results. Viewed against the background of earlier assessed attainments, results did not differ significantly between ethnic groups. By the time that they left school black pupils, and especially black girls, had improved their relative position to a considerable extent. This largely reflected the increased participation of black pupils in the examination system.
Thinking about nothing: Development of concepts of zero
Authors: Wellman Henry M. , Miller Kevin F.
Published: July 2011

Two studies are reported investigating children's conceptions of the number zero. The first, with 31/2–61/2‐year‐olds, charts preschoolers' understanding that zero is a number among other numbers with its own unique value, namely nothing. Children's achievement of this understanding occurred in three phases. At each phase understanding of zero lagged behind comparable understanding of other small numbers. The second study, with 51/2–10‐year‐olds, investigated children's developing conception of simple algebraic rules, such as a + 0 = a. Results showed that even the younger children had some understanding of several algebraic rules. The older children had acquired more such knowledge, but at all ages algebraic understanding was advanced for rules pertaining to zero, in comparison to those pertaining to other small numbers. These results suggest that zero plays a special role in children's increasingly algebraic knowledge of number. We conclude that since zero is difficult to conceive of and use originally (Expt 1) children develop special rules for its use, and that this provides a first step towards their formulation of more general algebraic rules (Expt 2) and towards an expanded conception of number and mathematics.
Interpersonal competence, social assertiveness and the development of humour
Authors: Bell Nancy J. , McGhee Paul E. , Duffey Nelda S.
Published: July 2011

Social and personality correlates of humour were studied with a college age sample (n = 446) and a small sample of elderly women (n = 27). In the college sample, self‐monitoring of expressive behaviour and social assertiveness were more important predictors of humour than were general social self‐esteem, machiavellianism, masculinity or femininity for both male and female respondents. These results were partially replicated in the elderly sample.
Mechanical, behavioural and Intentional understanding of picture stories in autistic children
Authors: Baron‐Cohen Simon , Leslie Alan M. , Frith Uta
Published: July 2011

High‐ability autistic children were compared with low‐ability Down's syndrome children and clinically normal preschool children on a picture sequencing task. When the sequences could be understood in terms of causal‐mechanical or simply descriptive‐behavioural criteria, the autistic children were at least as good as the controls and often showed superior performance. However, on sequences that evoked understanding in terms of psychological‐Intentional criteria, the autistic children performed much worse than the others. This pattern was also seen in the language used by the children in narrating the stories afterwards. In contrast to the controls, the autistic children used causal and behavioural language, but hardly ever mental state language. This experiment confirms and extends a previous study of ours which also tested the hypothesis of a specific cognitive deficit which apparently prevents the development of a ‘theory of mind’ in the autistic child.
Children's perception of ‘aesthetic’ properties of the arts: Domain‐specific or pan‐artistic?
Authors: Winner Ellen , Rosenblatt Elizabeth , Windmueller Gail , Davidson Lyle , Gardner Howard
Published: July 2011

A method is presented for examining perceptual development in the arts and a study based on this methodology is reported. The purpose of the study was to chart the developmental course of perceptual skills used in the arts and to investigate whether these skills generalize across art forms and aesthetic properties or are ‘art‐form‐specific’ and/or ‘property‐specific’.

The sensitivity of 7‐, 9‐ and 12‐year‐olds to three aesthetic properties (repleteness, expression and composition) was investigated in three art forms (drawing, music and literature). Sensitivity to aesthetic properties increased with age. Ability to perceive aesthetic properties in one art form did not predict ability to perceive these same properties in another art form (supporting the ‘art‐form‐specific’ position). In much the same way, ability to perceive one aesthetic property of an art form did not predict ability to perceive another aesthetic property in the same art form (supporting the ‘property‐specific’ position). These results suggest that young children do not attend fully to aesthetic properties of adult works of art and that aesthetic perception develops property by property, and domain by domain. Aesthetic perception appears to emerge as not one skill but many.
Children's play in Sri Lanka: A cross‐cultural study
Authors: Prosser G. V. , Hutt C. , Hutt S. J. , Mahindadasa K. J. , Goonetilleke M. D. J.
Published: July 2011

The play behaviours of Sri Lankan children were observed and categorized according to a scheme used with British preschool children. Two villages which differed in socio‐economic status were selected, and in each village 20 preschool children (10 boys and 10 girls) between the ages of 4 and 5 years were studied. Although cultural factors determined the content of their play, very few behaviours appear to be culturally specific, e.g. most of the children engaged in a recognizable form of symbolic play. Availability of toys did not inhibit the use of non‐toy materials, and other differences between children from the two villages were concordant with expectation. Boys engaged in more negative behaviour than girls, and also scored higher on fantasy object play. Results are comparable with those obtained with British children and provide face validity for the categorization scheme.
Memory for proper names: Age differences in retrieval
Authors: Cohen Gillian , Faulkner Dorothy
Published: July 2011

Memory for proper names was investigated using (i) a questionnaire and (ii) an experimental task. Subjects ranging in age from 20 to 80 years recorded details of naturally occurring retrieval blocks for proper names. Age differences in the nature of the blocks were apparent. For the young and middle‐aged partial information about the target name was usually available and non‐target candidates were elicited during search for the target name. Elderly subjects more frequently experienced an ‘empty gap’, with no partial information about the target name and no candidate names. The experimental task required recall of names and descriptions from specially constructed fictional biographies. There was an age‐related deficit in recall of all types of information, but in all age groups memory for names of people was poorer than memory for names of places, occupations and hobbies. Some explanations for the difficulty of retrieving people's names and for the age effects are considered.
Eliminating alternatives: Preschool children's use of indirect memory cues
Authors: Whittaker S. J.
Published: July 2011

Two studies investigated preschool children's ability to use indirect external cues to eliminate possible solutions in a retrieval problem. Children observed four toy animals being hidden at four identical locations and recall was tested by the experimenter asking the child what was at each location in turn. Two types of cues were given to assist recall. These provided information about (a) the identity of the four animals which were hidden; and (b) what was at locations other than the one being probed.

The first experiment investigated whether children who looked at both these sets of cues were able to eliminate possible retrieval solutions. Recall and error data indicated that they could do so. In the second experiment the two types of cues were presented separately. Only those cues which provided information about what was at locations other than the one being searched were found to help recall. The results are discussed for their implications for recent accounts of the development of cueing.
The relationship between interaction with the caregiver and the emergence of play activities during the one‐word period
Authors: Zukow Patricia Goldring
Published: July 2011

The relationship between interaction with the caregiver and the emergence of play activities during the one‐word period was examined in this research. In particular, Vygotsky's views regarding the importance of social interaction as the source of the child's knowledge of the world were discussed. In order to examine the role of the caregiver, observations were made of six children, two at each of three levels of semantic development within the one‐word period. At each level of semantic development the children's performance during interactive play sequences was significantly more advanced than their performance during non‐interactive sequences. These results lend support to Vygotsky's contention that children gain knowledge of the world through social interaction.
Serial recall of static and dynamic stimuli by deaf and hearing children
Authors: McGurk Harry , Saqi Sarah
Published: July 2011

Previous experiments have failed to obtain recency effects for graphically presented serial lists, whereas such effects are readily obtained when lists are presented in auditory or lipread format. These findings may be observed with both deaf and hearing subjects and it has been suggested that both groups of subjects encode lipread information phonologically.

It is argued that graphic displays have failed to yield recency effects because of their static nature. An experiment is reported in which deaf and hearing children were exposed to lists of digits presented in static graphic, lipread and dynamic graphic formats. Marked recency effects were only obtained with the latter two conditions. No differences were observed between deaf and hearing subjects in this respect.

The argument that deaf and hearing children encode lipread information in a non‐modality specific phonological code is examined. It is concluded that the argument is not supported by evidence currently available.
On the drawing of a cube and its derivatives
Authors: DeręLgowski J. B. , Strang Patricia
Published: July 2011

Primary schoolchildren from three grades of a Scottish school were required to draw a cube and its derivatives. The results show an orderly development of the technique of depiction and suggest that the difficulties which the juvenile draughtsmen encounter are partly due to the conflict between the desire to convey the overall impression of the model and the attempts to depict its constituent parts correctly. The ‘distortions’ which show this are dependent on the models used.
Cubes are difficult things to draw
Authors: Cox M. V.
Published: July 2011

The effects of general or specific verbal instructions on the production of a visual realistic drawing were investigated. Children aged 7 and 12 years and adults were asked to draw a cube placed in front of them on a table so that the front and top faces only could be seen. The two groups of children produced more two‐segment drawings with the specific than with the general instruction. The adults drew more two‐segment forms in both conditions. Most of the 7‐year‐olds' drawings were rectilinear. Most of the 12‐year‐olds' drawings contained obliques, and the parallel oblique form was particularly dominant. Although the adults, in contrast to the children, converged the ‘depth’ lines into the distance, only a minority of them did this; a sizable proportion of adults produced rectilinear forms. The data suggest that young children are more capable of visual realism and adults are less capable than the traditional theory of pictorial representation predicts.
The development of reaching in blind children
Authors: Bigelow Ann E.
Published: July 2011

The development of object awareness was studied longitudinally in five blind infants by presenting them with tasks designed to investigate the sequential development of reaching and search. The tasks tapped the relative importance of sound and touch in eliciting a reach and the development of object permanence from Stage 3 to Stage 5. The children's pattern of mastery of the tasks suggests that it is touch rather than sound which initially cues the children to the existence and/or location of an object and that the sequential development of object permanence in blind children parallels that of sighted children.
Drawings as messages: The effect of a communication game upon production of view‐specific drawings
Authors: Light Paul , McEwen Fiona
Published: July 2011

Below about age 7 years, children frequently disregard their own viewing position when drawing ‘in depth’ arrays. Can such children be induced to encode view‐specific information by creating a context within which such information is clearly important to the person for whom the drawing is made? A study involving 60 5‐year‐old children each drawing four simple three‐brick arrays is reported. Half the children drew the arrays under control conditions (‘Draw these bricks exactly as you see them’). The other half drew the arrays in the context of a game in which the drawings were to be used by their partner to reconstruct the array exactly as the drawer had seen it. Over 75 per cent of the drawings produced under the communication game conditions were accurate (i.e. view‐specific), while those produced under control conditions were accurate less than 30 per cent of the time. The results are discussed in terms of the social and communicative context of drawings.
Children' conceptions of relations between messages, meanings and reality
Authors: Robinson E. J. , Whittaker S. J.
Published: July 2011

The paper is in six sections. In the first, we summarize interpretations of the results of laboratory investigations in which children give or receive information about a particular object or event in the real world. In these studies there is assumed to be a match between the speaker' intended meaning (an internal representation) and the intended referent in the outside world, and it appears that 5–6‐year‐old children are often oblivious to the importance of a one‐to‐one relationship between meaning/referent and message. In the second section we offer a description to account for this: young children may treat the meaning of a message as being the intended outcome rather than the speaker' internal representation, and treat the message within its social context as being unproblematic, rather than as a clue from which it may or may not be possible to infer the intended meaning. In the third section we argue that experience of explicitly educational settings may be responsible for their achieving a conception of messages as being clues to internal representations, clues which may be inadequate. However, in the fourth section we show that there is little direct evidence concerning children' conceptions of meaning as internal representation. In the fifth section we show that children of this age appear to be able to handle relationships between internal representations and the real world when these are a straightforward match or mismatch, but they may not be able to do so in more complex cases such as those involving a slight mismatch. They may have equivalent difficulties with relationships between verbal messages and the internal representations which these express. In the final section we raise possible research issues for the future.
Critical notice: David Crystal on language handicap
Authors: Freeman Norman H.
Published: July 2011

David Crystal' work is an outstanding application of linguistic discipline to language handicap: linguistic symptomology must be accurately and comprehensively described. But issues which concern experimental psychology in general and developmental psychology in particular are scanted in favour of an idealization of the medical model and of the human observer. A crucial concept is missing, that of mental reality. Encounter with language handicap entails encounter with the patient' mind.
Three‐year‐olds' difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit
Authors: Perner Josef , Leekam Susan R. , Wimmer Heinz
Published: July 2011

The hypothesis, that a conceptual limitation underlies 3‐year‐olds' difficulty with false‐belief attribution (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), was tested against three competing hypotheses. These were: (1) failure to retain essential facts, (2) failure to understand the normal expectations which give rise to false belief and (3) pragmatic misinterpretation of the test question. Results showed that false‐belief attribution remained difficult for younger 3‐year‐olds despite their retention of essential facts and despite attempts to make expectations more explicit and prevent pragmatic misinterpretation. These findings strengthen the original hypothesis, specified here as the inability to assign conflicting truth values to propositions. This hypothesis can explain why 3‐year‐olds find pretend play, the distinction between expected and achieved outcomes, the real‐imaginary distinction and level 1 perspective taking easier to understand than false belief, the reality‐appearance distinction and level 2 perspective taking.
Interaction of early caregiving environment and infant developmental status in predicting subsequent cognitive performance
Authors: Ho Hsiu‐Zu
Published: July 2011

This study tests the hypothesis that the relationship between infant developmental status and subsequent cognitive performance is conditional upon aspects of the early caregiving environment. The sample includes 181 adopted infants and their adoptive mothers, in addition to 165 non‐adopted infants and their biological mothers. These subjects are participants in the Colorado Adoption Project and have been tested at 12, 24, 36 and 48 months of age. Three key points emerge from this study. First, the interaction between early developmental status and aspects of the caregiving environment assessed at 12 months can account for differences in cognitive performance one, two, and three years later. Second, a hierarchical multiple regression model, which incorporates a product variable to test for the interaction of the main effects, can be a useful tool in detecting conditional relationships in mother‐infant research. Thirdly, the conditional mother‐infant relationships found appear to be free of genetic confound.
Tactile discrimination of shape and intermodal transfer in 2‐ to 3‐month‐old infants
Authors: Streri Arlette
Published: July 2011

The aim of this study is to discover whether there is intermodal transfer of shape from touch to vision and vice versa in 2‐ to 3‐month‐old infants who are not yet capable of reaching out to visually specified objects. In the first experiment, a habituation procedure was used for each mode, with two samples of 32 children. Habituation and discrimination were found in the tactile and visual modes, and total exploration time was identical for the two modes. In the second experiment, the 32 children were made familiar with an object in either the visual or the tactile mode, and then two tests were carried out using (1) the same or (2) a different object. If transfer does occur, exploration time for the familiar object presented in the new mode should be less than that required for a new object presented in the new mode. Also, the infants should recognize the familiar object when it is presented to them in the familiar mode. In addition, intramodal discrimination should occur after successive presentations in different modes. Intermodal transfer from touch to vision but not from vision to touch did occur. Comparison with data obtained in 4/5‐month‐old children provides the basis for discussion of these findings.
The emergence of the word length effect in young children: The effects of overt and covert rehearsal
Authors: Johnston Rhona S. , Johnson Catherine , Gray Caroline
Published: July 2011

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of training 5‐year‐olds to carry out both overt and covert rehearsal in a serial order recall task. As the superior recall for short words versus long words in adults is attributed to the use of verbal rehearsal, it was hypothesized that young children who do not normally show these effects would do so when trained to rehearse. Both overt and covert rehearsal were found to be equally effective in producing a word length effect, and these results were taken as supportive of the view that such effects are due to verbal rehearsal. It was also concluded that when instructed to do so 5‐year‐olds can make effective use of inner speech in serial order recall tasks.
Competence of young children who fail to make a correct deduction
Authors: Freeman N. H. , Sepahzad M.
Published: July 2011

Children often fail easy reasoning tasks: how wide is the gap between success and failure? The present study found a high level of competence at picture selection to illustrate their conclusion in 6‐year‐olds who had reasoned badly, maintained over variation in natural‐language quantification, level of difficulty in picture discrimination and repeated testing. Identifying what an assertion denotes may be in advance of ability to integrate a pair of assertions. Research on reasoning needs to analyse the developmental course of both.
The attitudes of young children towards peers with severe learning difficulties
Authors: Lewis Ann , Lewis Vicky
Published: July 2011

Ten 6‐ and 7‐year‐olds attending a first school who were involved in an integration project with a group of 10 4‐ to 9‐year‐olds with severe learning difficulties (SLD) were interviewed individually on two occasions. The first interview preceded the integration project and examined their attitudes towards mainstream classmates whom they thought to be ‘not very clever’ or needing ‘a lot of help’. The second interview followed two afternoon integration sessions and examined their attitudes towards peers with SLD.

Descriptions of classmates with difficulties concerned ability on cognitive tasks or behaviour whereas those of the children with SLD focused on physical descriptors and/or classroom misbehaviour. Hypothesized causes of SLD were physical and the SLD children, unlike classmates with difficulties, were not seen as responsible for their condition. A minority of the mainstream children had evolved coherent explanations of SLD based on concepts of the SLD group as normal, but younger, children.

Attitudes towards children with SLD are discussed within a framework of attitude development based on that proposed by Katz (1982). Educational implications of the study are considered.
Some experimental studies of multi‐sensory teaching: the effects of manual tracing on children's paired‐associate learning
Authors: Hulme Charles , Monk Andrew , Ives Sarah
Published: July 2011

A series of four experiments investigated the effects of manual tracing on visual‐verbal paired‐associate learning. In the first experiment preschool children were taught the names of letters of the alphabet; tracing the letters facilitated this learning. This effect was explored further in three experiments where older children were taught letter names paired with abstract letter‐like forms. Tracing improved the learning of the names for these forms, and this improvement seemed attributable to improvements in visual recognition of the forms produced by tracing.
Children's intrinsic, extrinsic and internalized motivation: A developmental study of children's reasons for liked and disliked behaviours
Authors: Chandler Cristine L. , Connell James P.
Published: July 2011

This study investigates three different types of motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic, and internalized. Open‐ended interviews were conducted with 121 5‐ to 13‐year‐old children. Responses to a series of ‘why questions' about two types of behaviours (liked and disliked) were collected and used as indices of the three types of motivation. Responses were initially coded into 10 motivational categories, and then into three motivational supercategories: intrinsic, extrinsic, and internalized. Reasons falling into these three categories were then examined for hypothesized age differences and differences in the frequencies of the categories for the two classes of behaviour. Support was found for the hypothesis that liked behaviours would be intrinsically motivated across the age range. In contrast, age group differences were obtained in the motivation for disliked behaviours, with extrinsic motivation showing higher frequencies at the younger ages and internalized motivation showing higher frequencies at the older ages. The importance children attributed to doing disliked behaviours was positively associated with internalized motivation. These results suggest that intrinsic and internalized motivations are conceptually and developmentally distinct motivational sources and thus should be examined separately in research on children's motivational development.
Inspection time, information processing and the development of intelligence
Authors: Anderson Mike
Published: July 2011

Three experiments are reported which attempt to relate different information‐processing measures to individual differences in intelligence, and to developmental change. The first investigates Inspection Time (IT), a measure of the speed of sensory processing. The second and third investigate two aspects of memory processing; the rate of extraction of items from long‐term verbal memory (Posner & Mitchell, 1967) and the rate of scanning single items in short‐term memory (Sternberg, 1966). Measures of the variability of Reaction Times (RTs) are taken from the memory experiments. One hundred and fourteen children, ranging in age from 7–12, who attended a Surrey primary school, formed the subject pool. The experiments showed that IT is a special information‐processing measure, showing a different pattern of relationship with intelligence and development to that shown by the memory‐processing and RT variables. My conclusions are that IT reflects the efficiency of a basic processing mechanism, which is unchanging over the ages investigated, and that this efficiency may be unrelated to other basic cognitive mechanisms, such as memory retrieval.
Concepts of intelligence of primary school, high school and college students
Authors: Chen M. J. , Holman J. , Francis‐Jones N. , Burmester L.
Published: July 2011

This research reports a comparison of expressed beliefs about intelligence and considers the question of what behaviours are rated as intelligent in terms of relevance to the lives of three groups: primary school, high school and college students. Each person was asked to rate a set of 26 intelligence test items chosen from four popular scales (Stanford Binet, WAIS‐R, WISC‐R, and Raven's Progressive Matrices) on relevance to measuring intelligent behaviour, and on perceived difficulty after they had performed these tasks. The relevance ratings were taken as reflections of the group's concept of intelligence. The correlations of relevance ratings with perceived difficulty and with performance were negligible. This suggests that group differences in defining what constitutes intelligent behaviour across the three groups are not reflections of their own abilities in these tasks. Three types of skill were identified in each group by factor analytic techniques: Non‐verbal reasoning, verbal reasoning and retrieval of information. Primary school children rated the verbal reasoning skill as most relevant to measuring intelligence, the high school students treated all three as equally relevant, and the college students rated the non‐verbal reasoning skill to be the most relevant. This pattern of results is attributed to different task demands at primary schools, high schools, and colleges and to the changing basis on which people are differentiated.
Assisted learning: Levels of support
Authors: Warton Pamela , Bussey Kay
Published: July 2011

The influence of task support on the development of understanding of the balance scale was investigated. Task support was provided by an expert adult who both managed the task and provided verbal assistance. Two hundred subjects, 20 males and 20 females in each of five age groups (preschool, grade 1, grade 3, grade 5, adult) participated. There were four treatment groups which received increasing amounts of support, ranging from a base level of practical experience with the scale sequencing of items, elaborated instructions and prompts. Task understanding was assessed by two measures derived from Siegler's (1976) rule assessment approach and results indicated significant differences due to treatment. Increasing amounts of assistance led to improved understanding of the balance scale principles, although the addition of verbal assistance resulted in a highly significant improvement, over and above the gains resulting from the combined influence of task management features. These treatment effects were consistent across age and sex.
Relationships between blood lead, behaviour, psychometric and neuropsychological test performance in young children
Authors: Harvey P. G. , Hamlin M. W. , Kumar R. , Morgan G. , Spurgeon A. , Delves H. T.
Published: July 2011

A sample of 201 inner city dwelling children age 5.5 years was assessed on a wide variety of cognitive, performance, neuropsychological and behavioural measures. Extensive sociodemographic and family indices were also assessed. Body burden of lead was derived from a venous sample of blood. Data were analysed using both univariate and multivariate techniques. Results show that the initial correlations between blood lead and the outcome measures were generally few and low. No significant relationship was found between overall IQ and blood lead and the one marginally significant association found when the sample was split by father's occupation proved non‐significant on multivariate analysis. The only outcome measures that showed a significant association with blood lead following multivariate analysis were some tests requiring motor skills (where performance generally speeded up with increasing blood lead) and one reaction time measure where the converse obtained.
Developmental psychology and family law: A discussion paper
Authors: Richards M. P. M.
Published: July 2011

The starting point of this paper is developmental psychologists' lack of interest in family law, and the small use that is made of psychological work in judicial decision making about parents and children. The particular concern here is decisions related to children at divorce, the commonest situation where the law is involved with parent‐child relationships. The paper describes previous studies of judicial decision making in relation to children and points to some of their weaknesses. In considering the lack of psychological work on the topic, a number of contributory reasons are discussed. In particular, it is argued that our approach to parent‐child relationships has concentrated on the dyad rather than on the network of family relations which has made it difficult to study changes in family form such as that which follows divorce. It is suggested that both the recent increase in the divorce rate and changing theoretical approaches to parent‐child relationships should increase the attention given by psychologists to legal processes.
Postural evolution and integration of the prehension gesture in children aged 4 to 10 months
Authors: Fontaine Roger , le Bonniec Gilberte Pieraut
Published: July 2011

The development of prehension in 96 subjects aged 4 to 10 months was studied in relation to age and posture. It appears that, despite the strong statistical relation between age and posture, the latter is a better predictor of the degree of maturity of prehension gesture than is age. Postural acquisition, therefore, appears as one of the factors which cause restructuring of prehension in the course of the infant's development.
The development of size scaling in children's figure drawings
Authors: Silk Angèle M. J. , Thomas Glyn V.
Published: July 2011

Size scaling in drawings made by children aged 3:6 years to 6:5 years, was investigated in three experiments. In Expt 1, children's drawings of a man were taller than their drawings of a dog (i.e. correct ordinal height scaling) and the order of making the drawings (and thus space remaining on the paper) had no effect on their height. In terms of the combined area of head and trunk, however, dog drawings were smaller than man drawings only when the man was drawn first. In Expt 2, even the youngest children on average produced correct ordinal height scaling in their drawings of topics which differed greatly in real size (house, man and dog), but the height of the dog was overestimated relative to the man and the height of the man was overestimated relative to the house. The relative overestimation of dog and man declined with increasing age. In Expt 3, topics which did not differ greatly in size (man and door) were generally not scaled correctly, but the scaling was more accurate when man and door were drawn close together in the picture. Thus, an effort towards visually correct size scaling could be detected even in very young children's drawings, but only on a size dimension which was salient and relevant for topic differentiation.
Hand‐mouth coordination in the new‐born baby
Authors: Butterworth George , Hopkins Brian
Published: July 2011

The spontaneous motor activity of 15 new‐born babies was filmed and their arm and hand movements analysed in slow motion to yield detailed measurements of the interrelation between hand, head and mouth postures. These analyses revealed that new‐borns can move the hand to the mouth either directly or indirectly via the perioral region of the face. The mouth is open in ‘anticipation’ of arrival of the hand and the movement does not require visual guidance. This little‐known coordination may have important implications for theories of intersensorimotor relations and for the origins of intentionality.
Special section: Landmarks in spatial cognition and spatial development
Authors: Presson Clark C.
Published: July 2011

The papers in this section are the result of a conference on Landmarks in Spatial Cognition and Spatial Development, held at Arizona State University in February, 1988 and supported by the Graduate College. The conference participants prepared short position papers, which were intended to stimulate discussion about any interesting, unanswered questions, and to help define future directions for research concerning landmarks.
Developmental differences in the influence of orthographic and phonological information in visual word recognition
Authors: Rusted Jennifer
Published: July 2011

In a modified Stroop colour‐naming task, words which were semantically unassociated with the colour names, but which shared sound and spelling characteristics with those names, produced Stroop‐like facilitation and inhibition in groups of college students, 12‐ and 8‐year‐olds. When the stimulus words rhymed with the colour names but were orthographically dissimilar, effects were observed only for the 8‐year‐olds. The pattern of results suggests that phonological and orthographic characteristics of a word are available rapidly enough, in visual word recognition, to affect colour naming. For older subjects, the pattern of effects is consistent with lexical priming. For the younger subjects, the effects are attributed to the continued influence of grapheme‐phoneme translation rules in establishing production codes for word naming.
Perceptual role taking and protodeclarative pointing in autism
Authors: Baron‐Cohen Simon
Published: July 2011

In previous studies we have found that autistic children were severely impaired in conceptual role taking, that is, in their theory of mind. In this study we consider two possible precursors to this impairment, both of which are early interpersonal abilities. The first is perceptual role taking. A test of this revealed no impairment, ruling it out as related to the impairment in theory of mind. The second is pointing. This was shown to be abnormal, both in comprehension and production, relative to non‐autistic controls. In particular, protodeclarative pointing was impaired whilst protoimperative pointing was not. The possibility that impaired protodeclarative pointing may be a precursor to autistic children's impaired theory of mind is discussed.
A longitudinal study of visual habituation between 3, 5 and 8 months of age
Authors: Pêcheux Marie‐Germaine , Lécuyer Roger
Published: July 2011

Three issues are tackled in this longitudinal study of visual habituation in infants between 3 and 8 months of age: first, changes in habituation indexes with age; second, the developmental course of relations between indexes; and third, the individual stability of habituation. Two samples of 12 infants, from contrasting rearing conditions (Home vs. Residence for single mothers) were observed in an infant‐control procedure at 3, 5 and 8 months. Five continuous variables [accumulated looking time to reach criterion (ALT), duration of the first two trials, percentage of baseline, slope, and peak fixation] and three discontinuous variables (number of trials to criterion, rank trial of peak fixation, and pattern of habituation) were derived. ALT and baseline durations decrease with age, and the internal organization of visual attention during habituation changes with age, with a decrease in the relative weight of first fixations. Rearing conditions interact with age; there was evidence for a developmental lag in Residence infants. Stability of ALT was low but significant between pairs of consecutive measures, but dropped to zero over a 5‐month lag. We discuss respective roles of abilities to process information and to sustain attention during the course of an habituation sequence, as well as the prerequisites for a valid predictive use of habituation speed in a developmental perspective.