bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Systems Methods for Developmental Research
Authors: Molenaar Peter C. M. , Nesselroade John R. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractIn this chapter a broad variety of aspects of dynamic systems approaches is discussed, including heuristic descriptions of methodological issues, experimental designs, mathematical models associated with such approaches and, in particular, statistical methods to fit dynamic systems models to appropriate empirical data. The authors start with a breakthrough in statistical modeling that has fundamental consequences for developmental science. It is shown that a general mathematical theory, called ergodic theory, puts dynamic systems approaches at the center of statistical modeling in developmental science. A general dynamic factor model is presented, which captures most of the statistical models that are appropriate in linear dynamic systems approaches. It is shown how specific variants of dynamic factor models enable critical tests of key characteristics of developmental processes. The chapter continues with an extensive discussion of the implications of nonlinear dynamic systems approaches for an important topic in developmental science: the analysis of stage‐wise development. Special emphasis is given here to neural network models and dynamic systems models based on catastrophe theory. The chapter closes with a heuristic presentation of mathematical control theory of dynamic systems as an important tool for optimal guidance of developmental processes.
Neuroscientific Methods With Children
Authors: de Haan Michelle 
Published: March 2015

Abstract
Neuroscientific methods can be used to capture the structural and functional changes happening in the human nervous system as it develops throughout infancy, childhood, adolescence, and across the life span. This chapter begins with an overview of issues that influence the way that the brain can be measured and how these measurements can be interpreted. It then goes on to describe methods for measuring development of brain structure, including structural magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion tensor imaging and ultrasounds. Next, methods for measuring functional brain development are described, including functional magnetic resonance imaging, near infrared spectroscopy, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and electromyography. In the last section, methods for assessing the autonomic nervous system are described, including measures of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. The chapter closes with discussion of what neuroscientific methods can add to behavioral research, and highlights both their advantages and limitations.
Growth Curve Modeling and Longitudinal Factor Analysis
Authors: Ram Nilam , Grimm Kevin J. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractIn psychological science, developmentalists are often interested in examining and understanding change processes. In this chapter we review a variety of longitudinal models and consider how they can be applied to examine intraindividual change and interindividual differences in change. First, a taxonomy describing three types of change processes (incremental change processes, transformational change processes, and stability‐maintenance processes) is presented and how a selection of contemporary longitudinal models can be tethered to that taxonomy is considered. A selection of growth models–with emphasis on models that are used to describe nonlinear trajectories–is reviewed and a shift toward the use of differential equations is suggested. A selection of time‐series models is shown, with emphasis on models that may facilitate analysis of the big data streams that will become available in few years. Although the distinctions among types of change processes and among analytical frameworks are necessarily fuzzy, the hope is that by explicitly discussing the analytical methods as abstract representations of core aspects of change, researchers will be able to select study designs and analytical procedures that map to and more precisely test their theories of change. The chapter finishes with some notes on implementation, with encouragement for further consideration of nonlinearity, to measure more frequently, and to label parameters with theoretically meaningful names.
Perceptual Development
Authors: Johnson Scott P. , Hannon Erin E. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractInfants' perceptual systems are the primary means to acquire and interpret knowledge about events, objects, and people in the world around them. This chapter begins with discussion of theories of perceptual development and its consequences for children's cognitive and social development. We then discuss neural foundations of perception and the emergence and maturation of sensory systems before and after birth, followed by detailed sections on audition, vision, and intermodal perception. Throughout, we focus on questions of how the developing child extracts meaningful information from the sensory array—that is, how the observer detects, synthesizes, and interprets sensory input so as to yield perception of structured events and objects—and how effects of experience on perceptual development interact with developmental timing and what has already been acquired. We focus also on developmental mechanisms—growth, experience, and learning—and we examine as well the malleability, or plasticity, of perceptual systems during development. The chapter concludes with discussion of how different theoretical views may be reconciled in light of the developing child in a wider context.
The Development of Symbolic Representation
Authors: Callaghan Tara , Corbit John 
Published: March 2015

AbstractSymbolic representation is fundamentally a communicative behavior that sets humans apart from other species and binds them together in communities and other social groups. This chapter examines the development of symbolic representation, and we restrict our review to studies of symbolic representation in the sense of external symbols used in communication with others. We begin the chapter by considering the varieties of definitions, theoretical approaches and recurring themes that have emerged from classical and contemporary approaches. In the next section, dominant themes from contemporary theory guide our review of the empirical findings from studies of language (including gesture), pretense, and material artifacts (including scale models, pictures, video and maps). We consider findings from comparative research and cultural developmental studies to deepen our understanding of the origin of human symbolic representation. We end the chapter with a consideration of the challenges facing researchers who would like to move the field beyond insightful descriptions of the course of symbolic development, toward process accounts of that development.
The Development of Play
Authors: Lillard Angeline S. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractPlay is a quintessential activity of childhood, the cognitive implications of which have generated longstanding theoretical and empirical interest. This chapter begins with the difficult issue of how to define play, then considers the two classic play theories, those of Piaget and Vygotsky. Next it covers varieties of play, from sensorimotor to physical, and from exploratory to symbolic, including the developmental course of each type. The bulk of the chapter concerns six current focal issues in play and cognitive development: (1) pretend play and theory of mind, (2) how children make sense of symbolic substitutions in pretend play, (3) constraints on object substitutions in children's play, (4) how children discriminate pretend from real, (5) how babies are initiated into pretend play, and (6) whether pretend play improves developmental outcomes. The next sections of the chapter address group differences in play by gender, developmental differences (visual and hearing impairments, autism), and culture, and the final section addresses future directions in play research.
Conceptual Development
Authors: Sloutsky Vladimir 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThis chapter is concerned withhowchildren acquire conceptual knowledge and how domains themselves may emerge as a consequence of learning and development. I organize the material using a theoretical framework that includes three important aspects to human concepts. First, there is the ability to form categories (or equivalence classes of discriminable entities) by focusing on commonalities and abstracting away differences. Second, there is the ability to lexicalize some of these categories and use the word in reference to an individual and the entire class. Third, there is the ability to use words as knowledge hubs for accumulating knowledge about these lexicalized categories, and subsequently form more abstract categories and make predictions. I argue that the ability to form categories is shared with other mammals and perhaps with other vertebrates, whereas the latter two abilities are uniquely human. Finally, I consider the basic ability to learn and use categories as well as the ability to form and use lexicalized concepts serving as knowledge hubs.
The Development of Executive Function
Authors: Müller Ulrich , Kerns Kimberly 
Published: March 2015

AbstractResearch on executive function has grown dramatically over the past three decades. Even though the term emerged only 40 years ago, the concept of executive function can be traced back to far earlier clinical and empirical research on the frontal lobes. After a brief overview of the history of executive function, we discuss influential theories of executive function. We next review the development of the prefrontal cortex and the neural substrate, which has been associated with executive function, and summarize research on particular component processes of executive function. Research on executive function faces a variety of methodological challenges that we review in the next section. The sources of executive function development are examined in the next section, with particular emphasis on the ways in which social factors and language facilitate its development. Our next section summarizes research of executive function on two other domains of functioning, namely, social understanding and academic achievement. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that executive function should be studied as a distributed process that develops as a result on the child's embodied interaction within a social context.
The Development of Temporal Cognition
Authors: McCormack Teresa 
Published: March 2015

AbstractTime features in two key ways in cognition, each of which is discussed in turn in this chapter: Time is processed as a dimension of stimuli or events, and time is represented as a framework in which events can be located. Section 1 examines the first of these from a developmental perspective, by reviewing research on age‐related changes in the accuracy of duration processing. The Piagetian approach linked changes in duration processing to the development of a concept of time as a dimension of events separable from other event dimensions. This is contrasted with research conducted within the framework of scalar expectancy theory, which models development in terms of changes in components of specialized timing processes. Section 2 discusses developmental changes in the temporal frameworks that children use to represent the locations of events. Although as adults, we represent time as locations on a linear framework stretching from the past, to the present, and into the future, this way of representing time is not developmentally basic. A model is proposed of developmental stages in the acquisition of a mature temporal framework. The chapter concludes by considering two themes that cut across Sections 1 and 2: the issue of whether there are both qualitative and quantitative changes in children's temporal abilities, and the link between temporal and spatial cognition.
The Development of Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Nunes Terezinha , Bryant Peter 
Published: March 2015

AbstractPsychological research on the development of children's mathematical reasoning has focused either on their understanding of quantities or on their knowledge of number. A synthesis between these two different kinds of theory can be achieved by acknowledging that numbers have two meanings: a representational meaning, defined by their use as signs for quantities or relations between quantities, and an analytical meaning, defined by the conventions in the number system. In the introduction, this chapter introduces these two meanings of numbers and explores the vital connections between them. The subsequent sections analyze how children's mathematical knowledge develops by their increasing ability to use different numerical representations (e.g., from the use of fingers to represent quantities to the use of conventional signs), by their growing understanding of invariant relations between quantities (e.g., realizing that, given a fixed number of cookies, the more people sharing the cookies, the less each one receives) and by their increasing awareness of the relevance of specific concepts to different situations (e.g., understanding the relevance of division to the solution of situations more readily connected to multiplication). Throughout the chapter, the connection between the nature of quantities and their numerical representations is explored. The final substantive section focuses on the use of numbers to quantify space and relations between spatial dimensions, and argues that understanding relations between different dimensions in space (e.g., length, width, and area) is crucial to quantifying space. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of directions for future research.
Literacy Development
Authors: Lonigan Christopher J. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThis chapter discusses literacy development by, first, outlining the nature of the reading of text in alphabetic languages. The process of acquiring word‐level reading skills is then described, including learning the alphabetic code, early decoding, and the development of word reading. In turn, processes associated with reading comprehension are discussed in regard to lower order skills, higher order skills, and construction–integration models. The chapter then considers the early development of reading‐related skills and discusses the behavior genetics of these skills and emergent literacy and its development. Issues related to the nature and identification of reading difficulties and disorders are discussed, and, finally, different approaches to reading instruction and the evidence in support of these approaches, with a focus on early instruction, are described.
Artistic Development
Authors: Milbrath Constance , McPherson Gary E. , Osborne Margaret S. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractArchaeological evidence indicates that modern humans have been making music, portable art, and painting the walls of caves for at least the last 35,000 years. Through the activities of drawing and song these two art forms are also the first in which young children take an active part. In this chapter, we review what is known about children's artistic development in the visual arts and music, focusing on the historical and theoretical grounding of artistic development, the psychological and physical attributes of the developing child that play a role in children's artistry, and the sociocultural contexts in which child art and development occurs. The chapter is divided into two major sections, one on the visual arts and a second on music. Each section begins by describing the known inceptions of the art form and the historical and contemporary approaches to children's development in these arts, followed by a review of research considering children's developmental achievements and underlying competencies in the artistic domain. Studies of atypically developing children and inquiries into children's understanding and aesthetic experience of the art form are also presented. A discussion of cultural differences in artistic practice and the influences these different practices have on children's artistic outcomes concludes each major section.
Measuring Socioemotional Development
Authors: Brownell Celia A. , Lemerise Elizabeth A. , Pelphrey Kevin A. , Roisman Glenn I. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractIn this chapter, we review and evaluate the three primary sources of measures in research on socioemotional development: observational methods; verbal reports, including interviews and questionnaires; and psychobiological approaches, including neurophysiological, psychophysiological, and genetic assessments. Issues of reliability and validity are discussed along with the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to measurement. Illustrations are provided for children of different ages and issues unique to each class of measurement are also considered. The chapter begins with a discussion of common issues that cut across measurement approaches, some of which are unique to developmental science; these include measuring continuity and discontinuity, stability and change, and the roles of participant characteristics and measurement contexts. The chapter closes with a discussion of future opportunities and challenges, including the adoption of measurement approaches that capture complex transactions across levels of analysis from genes to brains to behavior; neuroimaging of social interaction; and the triangulation of methods and measures across observations, verbal reports, and psychobiology to provide a “molecules‐to‐mind” approach to the study of socioemotional development.
Evolution and Prenatal Development
Authors: Coall David A. , Callan Anna C. , Dickins Thomas E. , Chisholm James S. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThe crucial impact prenatal influences have on development has been recognized for millennia. It is now known that the environment experienced during pregnancy influences development in a way that has consequences for physical and mental health throughout life. This burgeoning field of enquiry encapsulates a broad range of disciplines, but until recently these fields of research were not synthesized or unified. Over the past 30 years, evolutionary theory has been utilized to improve scientists' understanding of the impact prenatal influences have on development. This chapter begins by outlining evolutionary theory and its interaction with development leading to the emerging significance of modern epigenetics. Life history theory, a branch of evolutionary theory that is applied to the interaction between developmental and evolutionary processes, is then used as a framework for the subsequent discussion of prenatal development. The impacts that maternal stress, maternal nutrition, and the exposure to toxins and pollutants during pregnancy have on prenatal development are then explored. This chapter ends by highlighting empirical and theoretical pathways developed out of this unique multilevel synthesis that are likely to be dynamic areas of research into the future.
Socioemotional Consequences of Illness and Disability
Authors: Crnic Keith , Neece Cameron 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThis chapter addresses core developmental approaches to understanding the nature of social and emotional consequences of illness and disability during the developmental period.The chapter addresses the ways in whichdevelopmental disabilitiesandchronic illnessshare a particular risk status, but can also be differentiated. Definitions and epidemiology are broadly considered to set the stage for the specific social and emotional domains to be reviewed.Three basic domains are addressed in depth:social and peer competencies, emotion and emotion regulation,andbehavior and emotion problems. Disabilities and chronic illnesses are discussed both separately and together within these domains. The shifting nature of the conceptual paradigms used to understand the consequences of chronic conditions (pathology versus adaptationalor positive approaches) are discussed.Both endogenous and exogenous factors that contribute to the consequences of chronic conditions are addressed.Genetic approacheshighlight the endogenous considerations, whilefamily, school, and cultural factorsare the focus of the exogenous factors that contribute. These considerations lead to a discussion ofintervention approachesthat have addressed socioemotional competencies in children with chronic conditions.The chapter concludes with a review of thecurrent state of the field,and suggestions for thenext generation of researchfor the field.
Race, Class, and Ethnicity in Young Adulthood
Authors: McLoyd Vonnie C. , Purtell Kelly M. , Hardaway Cecily R. 
Published: March 2015

AbstractThis chapter examines how social class, race, and ethnicity shape the transition to adulthood, drawing heavily on life course theory, developmental contextualism, and the concepts of risk, resilience, and social capital as analytic anchors. Four domains of functioning are discussed—conceptions of adulthood, mental health, paid employment, and educational attainment. Emphasis is given to studies that illuminate processes that link social location to the development of youth (mediational processes) and studies that examine sources of variation in developmental pathways among economically disadvantaged and ethnic minority youth, with special attention to the positive end of the risk dimension (i.e., promotive factors). We also highlight protective factors, that is, factors and processes that mitigate the negative effects of economic advantage and ethnic minority status on the functioning of youth during the transition to adulthood. Each major section of the chapter concludes with a summary and discussion of questions and issues that merit study in future research. The chapter emphasizes research based on U.S. samples, but incorporates research findings from youth in Canada and Western European countries.
Gendered Development
Authors: Hines Melissa 
Published: March 2015

AbstractHow does human behavior come to be gendered, and how do gendered behaviors change or remain stable over time? Although men and women, as well as girls and boys, are largely similar psychologically and behaviorally, there are some areas of gender difference. These include gender identity; sexual orientation; childhood play behaviors, such as toy, playmate, and activity preferences; personality characteristics, such as aggression and empathy; and some specific spatial, mathematical, and verbal abilities. The incidence of many psychiatric disorders also differs by sex. These gender differences appear to result from numerous factors and their interactions. These include genetic information on the sex chromosomes; concentrations of gonadal steroids, particularly testosterone, before and shortly after birth; socialization by parents, peers, teachers, and strangers; and cognitive developmental processes. Gender identity also is a mechanism for acquiring gendered behavior; based on this identity, children self‐socialize gendered behavior. These factors have been shown to act individually to influence gendered outcomes. They are also likely to interact with one another to shape gender development, but little research has investigated these interactions. An understanding of gendered development is important for addressing differences between the sexes in social roles and economic status, and should also be relevant to understanding and ameliorating psychiatric disorders that differ by gender. A complete understanding will probably require developmental systems approaches to understanding change and stability over time, but, thus far, such approaches have been uncommon.