Early motor development and cognitive abilities among Mexican preschoolers

Psychomotricity plays a very important role in children’s development, especially for learning involving reading–writing and mathematical calculations. Evaluate motor development in children 3 years old and its relationship with their cognitive abilities at the age of 5 years. Based on a cohort study, we analyzed the information about motor performance evaluated at 3 years old by Peabody Motor Scale and cognitive abilities at 5 years old. The association was estimated using linear regression models adjusted by mother’s intelligence quotient, sex, Bayley mental development index at 18 months, and quality of the environment at home (HOME scale). 148 children whose motor performance was determined at age 3 and was evaluated later at age 5 to determine their cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities (verbal, quantitative, and memory) measured by McCarthy Scales. Significant positive associations were observed between stationary balance at age 3 with verbal abilities (β = 0.67, p = .04) and memory (β = 0.81, p = .02) at 5 years. Grasping and visual-motor integration were significant and positively associated with quantitative abilities (β = 0.74, p = .005; β = 0.61, p = .01) and memory (β = 2.11, p = .001; β = 1.74, p = .004). The results suggest that early motor performance contributes to the establishment of cognitive abilities at 5 years. Evaluation and early motor stimulation before the child is faced with formal learning likely helps to create neuronal networks that facilitate the acquisition of academic knowledge.     

The development of automatic numerosity processing in preschoolers: evidence for numerosity-perceptual interference

Three experiments examined developmental changes in the automatic processing of numerosity and perceptual information using a nonsymbolic numerical Stroop paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2 (E1 and E2), 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds had to compare the numerosities or the total filled areas of collections of dots (E1) or bars (E2) varying along both dimensions. Experiment 3 replicated E2's results in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Results demonstrated the existence of reciprocal influences between numerical and perceptual information beginning at age 3. Moreover, the irrelevant perceptual influences remained stable throughout development, whereas the sensitivity to irrelevant numerical cues tended to increase with age despite children's growing inhibition capacities. No significant correlation could be found between these developmental changes and the acquisition of counting knowledge.     

Further development of measures of early math performance for preschoolers

The purpose of this study was to examine the progress monitoring and screening accuracy for a set of curriculum-based measures (CBM) of early mathematics skills. Measures included counting objects, selecting numbers, naming numbers, counting, and visual discrimination. Measures were designed to be administered with preschoolers in a short period of time using a developmentally appropriate format, and to constitute minimal disruption to the classroom routine. Previous research indicated that each of these measures produced scores with acceptable consistency across alternate forms on consecutive days. Scores yielded on the experimental probes correlated moderately, in most cases, with two commonly used standardized measures (i.e., the Brigance Screens and TEMA-2). Performance on the probes also correlated with teacher rankings and ratings of child performance. In the present study, data were collected in two phases. In the first phase, a cohort of children were administered the early math measures in spring of preschool and were followed into winter of kindergarten where they were administered kindergarten CBM probes to examine the degree to which performance in preschool (as measured by the early math probes) could predict performance on similar tasks in kindergarten. Second, risk criteria were examined and compared to identification by the Brigance Screens. These analyses provided data about the potential accuracy of the probes for screening. In the second phase, sensitivity of the probes to performance differences was examined by comparing mean performance on the probes of preschoolers and kindergartners. The lowest-performing children were provided with seven intervention sessions to examine the degree to which probes could detect growth resulting from intervention. Directions for future research and implications for practice are discussed.     

The development of spatial relation representations: evidence from studies of cerebral lateralization

Twenty-four-5-year-olds and 24 7-year-olds completed two divided-visual-field tasks; one task required subjects to categorize a dot as above or below a line, whereas the other required subjects to determine whether the dot was within 3 mm of the line. There was a relative left-hemisphere advantage for the above/below task and a relative right-hemisphere advantage for the distance task. The results indicate that distinct processing subsystems compute different kinds of visuo-spatial relations as early as 5 years of age.     

Claiming evidence from non‐evidence: a reply to Morton and Harper

Morton and Harper (2007 ) argue that research presented in support of a bilingual advantage in the development of executive control has been confounded with social class, the actual mechanism for group differences. As evidence, they report a study in which a small group of monolingual and bilingual 6‐ and 7‐year‐olds performed similarly on a Simon task. The present paper points to weaknesses in their experimental design, analysis, and logic that together undermine their criticism of the conclusion that bilingualism is responsible for the reported group differences.     

Early locomotion and the development of spatial language: Evidence from young children with motor impairments

Recent studies show that young children with type-2 spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) can succeed in spatial search tasks. Such results suggest that locomotor impairment may not be a risk factor responsible for a dramatic slowing down or deviation in the development of spatial cognition. The present experiment pursues this question in relation to spatial language to determine whether self-produced locomotion is a necessary prerequisite for the normal acquisition of spatial terms. It compares how two groups of young French children (mean age 33 months) comprehend and produce spatial markers: one group of 12 type-2 SMA children and a control group of 12 healthy children. The results show no significant difference between the two groups with one exception: SMA children displayed a better performance when producing markers for the relations in front of and behind. The performance of SMA children suggests that, despite their total deprivation of experience in locomotion, they have the capacity to acquire and to use rich spatial representations that are embodied in the semantics of natural languages.     

Phonological awareness and language intervention in preschoolers from low socio‐economic backgrounds: A longitudinal investigation

This study examines the literacy outcomes for children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds who had received specific whole‐class phonological awareness (PA) and language intervention in preschool. The participants were 57 children who had been involved in the original intervention study. Their PA skills, letter‐sound knowledge, real word and non‐word spelling and reading comprehension were assessed in Grade 2. The results indicated that children who had received intervention in preschool performed similarly to the children who had not received intervention. The gains made in PA and language skills post intervention had failed to augment further literacy development. A post hoc examination of individual student profiles, however, revealed that a subgroup of children who had received intervention had maintained their enhanced performance and that the intervention cohort had similar scores on tests of PA ability to their age‐matched peers in the population. It was concluded that whole‐class, teacher‐delivered, PA and language intervention, while effective in the short term, does not lead to a generalized improvement in literacy skills in Grade 2. Possible reasons for the failure of the program to produce medium term gains are discussed.     

Development of spatial memory and spatial orientation in preschoolers and primary school children

The present study addresses the question of what kind of information children use when orientating in new environments, if given proximal and distal landmarks, and how spatial memory develops in the investigated age groups. Ten 5-year-old, ten 7-year-old and ten 10-year-old children were presented with the ‘Kiel Locomotor Maze’, containing features of the Radial Arm Maze and the Morris Water Maze, in order to assess spatial memory and orientation. Children had to learn to approach baited locations only. Task difficulty was equated with respect to the children's age. Training was given until the children reached criterion. During testing, the maze configuration and response requirements were systematically altered, including response rotation, cue rotation, cue deletion and response rotation with cue deletion in order to assess the spatial strategies used by the children. During training and testing, working-memory errors (WM), reference-memory errors (RM) and working-reference memory errors (WR) were recorded. As expected, no difference between age groups appeared during training, thus confirming comparable task difficulty across age groups. During testing, age groups differed significantly with regard to the orientation strategy used. The 5-year-olds were bound to a cue strategy, orientating towards local, proximal cues. The 10-year-olds mastered all tasks, thus displaying a place strategy, being able to use distal cues for orientation, and were even able to do so after being rotated 180°. The 7-year-olds proved to be at an age of transition: five of them were bound to a cue strategy, five children were able to adopt a place strategy. The differences in the orientation strategies used by children of different age groups was reflected by the sum of errors they made, also by RM. WM were found to be rare, especially in older children. We conclude that preschoolers use a cue strategy, that the development of place strategies occurs during primary school age and seems to be complete by the age of 10 years.     

Further evidence for the role of mode-independent short-term associations in spatial Simon effects

We examined the conditions under which short-term associations between stimuli and responses can produce spatial Simon effects. On location-relevant trials, participants gave neutral responses (i.e., they uttered the nonsense syllable "bee" or "boo") on the basis of whether the presented word had the meaning of "left" or "right." On location-irrelevant trials, they gave the same responses on the basis of the color of left and right squares. Performance on the location-irrelevant trials was affected by the match between the irrelevant location information and the location to which the correct response was assigned on the location-relevant trials. Experiment 1 showed that this extrinsic Simon effect was found only when the words on the location-relevant trials came from two different languages. In Experiment 2, we found an extrinsic Simon effect even when participants only received instructions about how to respond on location-relevant trials but no such trials were actually presented. Our findings suggest that task demands determine whether short-term associations are mode specific or mode independent and confirm that such associations can be set up as the result of instructions only.     

How attention enhances spatial resolution: evidence from selective adaptation to spatial frequency

In this study, we investigated how spatial resolution and covert attention affect performance in a texture segmentation task in which performance peaks at midperiphery and drops at peripheral and central retinal locations. The central impairment is called the central performance drop (CPD; Kehrer, 1989). It has been established that attending to the target location improves performance in the periphery where resolution is too low for the task, but impairs it at central locations where resolution is too high. This is called the central attention impairment (CAI; Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1998, 2000). We employed a cuing procedure in conjunction with selective adaptation to explore (1) whether the CPD is due to the inhibition of low spatial frequency responses by high spatial frequency responses in central locations, and (2) whether the CAI is due to attention's shifting sensitivity to higher spatial frequencies. We found that adaptation to low spatial frequencies does not change performance in this texture segmentation task. However, adaptation to high spatial frequencies diminishes the CPD and eliminates the CAI. These results indicate that the CPD is primarily due to the dominance of high spatial frequency responses and that covert attention enhances spatial resolution by shifting sensitivity to higher spatial frequencies.     

Functional equivalence of spatial images from touch and vision: evidence from spatial updating in blind and sighted individuals

This research examined whether visual and haptic map learning yield functionally equivalent spatial images in working memory, as evidenced by similar encoding bias and updating performance. In 3 experiments, participants learned 4-point routes either by seeing or feeling the maps. At test, blindfolded participants made spatial judgments about the maps from imagined perspectives that were either aligned or misaligned with the maps as represented in working memory. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 revealed a highly similar pattern of latencies and errors between visual and haptic conditions. These findings extend the well-known alignment biases for visual map learning to haptic map learning, provide further evidence of haptic updating, and most important, show that learning from the 2 modalities yields very similar performance across all conditions. Experiment 3 found the same encoding biases and updating performance with blind individuals, demonstrating that functional equivalence cannot be due to visual recoding and is consistent with an amodal hypothesis of spatial images.     

Early syntactic productivity: evidence from dative shift

The abstractness of children's early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children's knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are specific to individual lexical items. The present paper seeks to resolve this discrepancy by examining children's abstract knowledge of the English dative alternation via a production study. The studies ask whether young children who hear a sentence like I pilked the cup to Petey know that the same meaning can be expressed with the sentence I pilked Petey the cup. This generalization is well-attested in the language that children hear and represents a strong test-case for determining the nature of children's early syntactic representations. The results indicate that three-year-old children have productive knowledge of the English dative alternation, but that their performance can be influenced by small changes in the nature of the task. A preference for the prepositional dative form is also found and the possible reasons for this preference are discussed.     

The spatial thinking of origami: evidence from think-aloud protocols

Origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding, involves spatial thinking to both interpret and carry out its instructions. As such, it has the potential to provide spatial training (Taylor and Hutton under review). The present work uses cognitive discourse analysis to reveal the spatial thinking involved in origami and to suggest how it may be beneficial for spatial training. Analysis of think-aloud data while participants folded origami and its relation to gender, spatial ability measures, and thinking style suggest that one way that people profit from spatial training is through the possibility to verbalize concepts needed to solve-related spatial tasks.     

Shyness–anxiousness and receptive language skills development in Spanish- and English-speaking preschoolers

The present study utilized a short-term longitudinal research design to model the relationship between shyness–anxiousness and receptive language skills. Hypotheses regarding the direction of the causal relationship, mediation, and moderation were evaluated. Subjects included 340 Head Start attendees from primarily English- and Spanish-speaking homes. Results suggest that a unidirectional relationship between shyness–anxiousness and receptive language skills emerges in preschool. Shyness–anxiousness impacted receptive language skills and this relationship was mediated by communication competence. Neither gender nor native language moderated the indirect relationship from shyness–anxiousness to receptive language through communication competence. These results are discussed with respect to elucidating the nature of the bidirectional relationship between shyness–anxiousness and language skills and identifying intervention targets to improve language outcomes for shy–anxious preschoolers.     

Understanding of speaker certainty and false‐belief reasoning: a comparison of Japanese and German preschoolers

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English‐speaking 3‐year‐olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3‐year‐old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by grammaticalized particles of speaker (un)certainty, as in everyday Japanese utterances. The Japanese children were directly compared with same‐aged German children, whose native language does not have grammaticalized epistemic concepts. Japanese children profited from the explicit statement of the protagonist's false belief when it was marked with the attitude of certainty in a way that German children did not – presumably because Japanese but not German children must process such marking routinely in their daily discourse. These results are discussed in the broader context of linguistic and theory of mind development.     

Challenging the importance of vision for the development of an extrinsic spatial framework: evidence from the blind and sighted

Although connectionism is advocated by its proponents as an alternative to the classical computational theory of mind, doubts persist about its computational credentials. Our aim is to dispel these doubts by explaining how connectionist networks compute. We first develop a generic account of computation-no easy task, because computation, like almost every other foundational concept in cognitive science, has resisted canonical definition. We opt for a characterisation that does justice to the explanatory role of computation in cognitive science. Next we examine what might be regarded as the "conventional" account of connectionist computation. We show why this account is inadequate and hence fosters the suspicion that connectionist networks are not genuinely computational. Lastly, we turn to the principal task of the paper: the development of a more robust portrait of connectionist computation. The basis of this portrait is an explanation of the representational capacities of connection weights, supported by an analysis of the weight configurations of a series of simulated neural networks.     

Separate mechanisms recruited by exogenous and endogenous spatial cues: evidence from a spatial Stroop paradigm

The present experiments tested whether endogenous and exogenous cues produce separate effects on target processing. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated whether an arrow presented left or right of fixation pointed to the left or right. For 1 group, the arrow was preceded by a peripheral noninformative cue. For the other group, the arrow was preceded by a central, symbolic, informative cue. The 2 types of cues modulated the spatial Stroop effect in opposite ways, with endogenous cues producing larger spatial Stroop effects for valid trials and exogenous cues producing smaller spatial Stroop effects for valid trials. In Experiments 2A and 2B, the influence of peripheral noninformative and peripheral informative cues on the spatial Stroop effect was directly compared. The spatial Stroop effect was smaller for valid than for invalid trials for both types of cues. These results point to a distinction between the influence of central and peripheral attentional cues on performance and are not consistent with a unitary view of endogenous and exogenous attention.