Collaboration in young children

Humans accomplish much of what they do in collaboration with others. In ontogeny, children's earliest abilities to collaborate develop in two basic steps. First, 1- and 2-year-olds learn to form with others joint goals and joint attention--which include an understanding of the individual roles and perspectives involved. Second, as they approach their third birthdays, children's collaborative interactions with others take on a more normative dimension involving obligations to the partner. In addition, their cognitive abilities to conceptualize simultaneously both their own role and perspective along with those of the other develop considerably as well. This form of collaborative interaction is underlain by species-unique skills and motivations for shared intentionality that make possible, ultimately, such things as complex cultural institutions.     

Language evolution in children with cochlear implants

The capacity to incorporate significant words into the existing vocabulary and to use these words to form sentences with more mature syntactic structures emerges over a considerable time course in young deaf children who have undergone a cochlear implantation. The purpose of this follow-up study is to document the nature and time span of language production--in morphosyntactic and lexical skills--when a child's first experience with language sounds is provided artificially through electrical stimulation. To examine the development of these two aspects of linguistic processing, five deaf French children, all enrolled in similar postimplantation educational settings, were individually assessed at 6-month intervals over a period of 18 months. Computerized analyses were derived from their spontaneous speech in a 20-min standardized play session. Results for mean length of utterance and vocabulary revealed gradually improving performance for most children, in spite of the generally low starting point. Both measures of production nevertheless remained well below the norms established for normally hearing children. Although the achievement of higher production scores, which underlies more effective interpersonal exchanges, is evident after only 1 year of device use, it is clear that improvement does not always occur at the same pace, as shown by two of the children. This emphasizes the importance of longitudinal studies in documenting intersubject variability and intrasubject stability throughout the experience with an implant.     

Perspective role-taking in young children

Children between the ages of 4 and 7 years were asked to select a photograph depicting the visual perspective of a puppet which was placed at various locations around a dollhouse in a modified version of Piaget and Inhelder's three-mountain task. A shielded condition was used for half of the children. Three types of errors were examined in relation to the shield condition, age, and type of vantage point (views from the corners and from the sides). Shielding of the stimulus array reduced egocentric errors among 4-year-olds, producing a pattern of responses more typical of that observed among older children. Increasing specificity in perspective role-taking with age was indicated by changes in error patterns. Finally, the task was more difficult on trials with corner views, particularly when the child's own view included some of the cues present in the puppet's perspective.     

Retrieval-induced forgetting in young children

A prominent theory of cognitive development attributes the poor performance that children show in many cognitive tasks to a general lack of inhibitory control. We tested this theory by examining children’s inhibitory capabilities in retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), a memory task in which selective retrieval of previously studied material causes forgetting of related, nonretrieved material. Such forgetting is often attributed to inhibitory control processes, which supposedly suppress the nonretrieved items’ memory representation. We examined RIF in kindergartners, second graders, and adults, using both recall and recognition testing. Although all three age groups showed significant RIF in recall, only adults and second graders, but not kindergartners, showed RIF in recognition. Because inhibition-based RIF should be present in recall and recognition, these findings indicate that in adults and second graders, but not in kindergartners, RIF is mediated by inhibition. The results support the view of inefficient inhibitory processes in young children’s cognition.     

Behavioral inference in young children

Three experiments are reported on behavioral inference in children of 3 to 5 years of age. In each experiment the children learned two separate sequences of behavior which they were required to put together in the final test stage in order to obtain a reward. In the first experiment moderate levels of behavioral inference were obtained, although a relatively high proportion of children failed to respond in the test phase. In the second experiment different instructions were used in the test phase, the number of nonresponders was greatly reduced and a much higher proportion of children showed behavioral inference. The third experiment obtained similar results under conditions which excluded the possibility of mediation during a memory test, which was included in the previous experiments. It was concluded that behavioral inference is found, under suitable conditions, in children as young as 3-years-old, and that reports by other investigators of failure to find such inference up to the age of about 8 were due to problems with apparatus and instructions.     

Number development in young children

This paper presents new data on children's acquisition of counting skills. Three aspects of counting were studied: the formation of the cardinality rule that the last number named during counting denotes the number of objects in an array, the mastery of the counting procedure or the coordination of ordered number names and objects counted, and the growth of the knowledge that x + 1 is greater than x. A model was outlined which posits the hierarchic integration of six number skills to account for the growth of the knowledge that x + 1 is greater than x and the development of number conservation. The six skills are: the cardinality rule, the counting procedure, acquisition of more x's, judgments of relative numerosity, pattern recognition of small numbers, and one-to-one correspondences.     

Assesement of young children

Discusses important issues and problems related to the assessment of young children. A review of the literature identifies major trends in the field of assessment in early childhood education. Authors conclude that with increased emphasis on assessment of young children, there is an increased need to develop teachers' skills in both selection and interpretation of appropriate formal and informal assessment techniques.     

Foundations of cooperation in young children

Observations and experiments show that human adults preferentially share resources with close relations, with people who have shared with them (reciprocity), and with people who have shared with others (indirect reciprocity). These tendencies are consistent with evolutionary theory but could also reflect the shaping effects of experience or instruction in complex, cooperative, and competitive societies. Here, we report evidence for these three tendencies in 3.5-year-old children, despite their limited experience with complex cooperative networks. Three pillars of mature cooperative behavior therefore appear to have roots extending deep into human development.     

Virtuous testimonial belief in young children

I lay out the challenge posed by testimonial knowledge in young children to virtue reliabilist accounts of knowledge. In particular, I examine accounts from Greco and Pritchard and argue that those accounts are too demanding. More specifically, I make the case that young children can have testimonial knowledge without meeting the ability requirements claimed by Greco and Pritchard. As a virtue theoretic alternative, I argue that an agent’s belief must be epistemically virtuous, but that this may sometimes involve belief from a trait rather than an ability.     

Test response inconsistency in young children

Five studies were conducted which indicated that young children show a high degree of inconsistency of response from test to retest. The first three studies included one in which the same concepts were measured on two different forms of a test of basic concepts given one day apart—one in which the same test was given prior to and following a 3-month intervention program, and one in which the same concepts were presented twice on the same test. Studies four and five employed standardized test items from the Stanford Binet, WPPSI and McCarthy Scales with retest intervals of approximately 3 months and 15 minutes, respectively. Results indicated that preschool children show a high degree of variability when responding to the same test questions even with a short time interval. In the first two studies, 90% to 100% of the children were inconsistent in responding. In the third study, one third of the children responded inconsistently. The last two studies with standardized test items revealed inconsistency of response among approximately 40% to over 80% of the children, depending upon the retest interval and the items examined. The studies highlight the need for those who evaluate educational programs and those who design tests to have a greater understanding of the manner in which young children perform in situations that are designed to demonstrate learning.     

Showing-off and aggression in young children

Showing off or display behavior of children has gained little attention in child psychology research, while in the ethological literature the same behavior is a well known phenomenon. To see what role display behavior plays in peer-peer interaction compared to threat and physical aggression, the behavior of 18 children between 3 and 6 years of age was recorded over an entire school year. The frequencies of display behavior, threat and physical aggression were examined and related to the amount of attention a child received from his peers. The attention-rank had proved to be highly related to leadership abilities as well as dominance in children. The results show interesting similarities between the frequency and temporal patterns of display and threat behavior and the attention children pay to each other. Furthermore, older children with more kindergarten experience as well as high status children show a different temporal pattern (high frequencies after holidays and low frequencies before) as well as a higher frequency of display and threat behavior than younger and low status children. Physical aggression is related to attention-rank but shows quite a different temporal pattern. It seems that display or showing off behavior serves as a strategy for children to get high regard in the group.     

Implicit sequence learning in deaf children with cochlear implants

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) represent an intriguing opportunity to study neurocognitive plasticity and reorganization when sound is introduced following a period of auditory deprivation early in development. Although it is common to consider deafness as affecting hearing alone, it may be the case that auditory deprivation leads to more global changes in neurocognitive function. In this paper, we investigate implicit sequence learning abilities in deaf children with CIs using a novel task that measured learning through improvement to immediate serial recall for statistically consistent visual sequences. The results demonstrated two key findings. First, the deaf children with CIs showed disturbances in their visual sequence learning abilities relative to the typically developing normal-hearing children. Second, sequence learning was significantly correlated with a standardized measure of language outcome in the CI children. These findings suggest that a period of auditory deprivation has secondary effects related to general sequencing deficits, and that disturbances in sequence learning may at least partially explain why some deaf children still struggle with language following cochlear implantation.