SES affects infant cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility requires processing multiple sources of information and flexible adaptation of behavioral responses. Poverty negatively impacts cognitive control in young children, but its effects on infants are not well-understood. This study investigated longitudinally the development of cognitive flexibility in low-income infants. Thirty-two infants (15 low-SES, 17 high-SES) were tested at 6, 9, and 12 months of age. Cognitive flexibility was measured with a perseverative reaching task, where infants were taught to reach to one location and then asked to switch to a second location. High-SES infants replicated the typical developmental trajectory, reaching randomly at 6 months, perseverating at 9 months, and reaching correctly at 12 months. In contrast, the low-SES infants showed a delayed pattern, reaching correctly at 6 months, randomly at 9 months, and perseverating at 12 months. Links between cognitive flexibility and frontal cortex development are explored as a potential mechanism.     

Early childhood cognitive development and parental cognitive stimulation: evidence for reciprocal gene-environment transactions

Parenting is traditionally conceptualized as an exogenous environment that affects child development. However, children can also influence the quality of parenting that they receive. Using longitudinal data from 650 identical and fraternal twin pairs, we found that, controlling for cognitive ability at age 2 years, cognitive stimulation by parents (coded from video recorded behaviors during a dyadic task) at 2 years predicted subsequent reading ability at age 4 years. Moreover, controlling for cognitive stimulation at 2 years, children's cognitive ability at 2 years predicted the quality of stimulation received from their parents at 4 years. Genetic and environmental factors differentially contributed to these effects. Parenting influenced subsequent cognitive development through a family-level environmental pathway, whereas children's cognitive ability influenced subsequent parenting through a genetic pathway. These results suggest that genetic influences on cognitive development occur through a transactional process, in which genetic predispositions lead children to evoke cognitively stimulating experiences from their environments.     

Relationship assessment in infant mental health

Infant-caregiver relationships are the crucial context for infant development and psychopathology. Considerable evidence suggests that infants may construct qualitatively different relationships with different caregivers. For these reasons, infant-caregiver relationships should be a centerpiece of assessment in infant mental health. We advocate assessing infant relationships with all important caregivers in both clinic based and naturalistic settings. In this article we describe our approach, which attends both to the external component of the relationship, behavioral interaction, as well as the internal component of the relationship, subjective experience. By integrating results from assessments of these two components, we determine both level of relationship adaptation and the specific domains of strengths and weaknesses. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Early cognitive profiles of emergent readers: a longitudinal study

This longitudinal study examined the contribution of phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability to reading development in 142 English-speaking children from the start of kindergarten to the middle of Grade 2. Partial cross-lagged analyses revealed significant relationships between early performance on block design and matching letter-like forms tasks and later reading ability. Rhyme awareness correlated with later reading ability during the earliest stages, but onset awareness did not emerge as important until after the children had started reading. Digit span correlated significantly with future reading ability at every stage. These findings indicate that although phonological awareness, phonological memory, and visuospatial ability are all necessary for emergent reading, their relative importance varies across the first 2 years of reading development.     

Quantitative assessment of infant reaching movements

We have identified a fundamental property of human motor behavior as a tight coupling of the curvature-speed relationship in the reaching movements of 5- to 9-month-old infants. This relationship termed a movement unit, occurs regardless of the distance of duration of the reach and in spite of the developmental change that occurs in grasping during this period. Movement unit durations are tightly clustered around 200 ms regardless of overall duration or distance or the position of the unit in the reach. The curvature-speed coupling has been identified by others in adult reaching and handwriting. Models of biological motor control must account for this invariant relationship.     

Culture-fair cognitive ability assessment: information processing and psychophysiological approaches

Valid assessment with diverse populations requires tools that are not influenced by cultural elements. This study investigated the relationships between culture, information processing efficiency, and general cognitive capacities in samples of Caucasian and Mexican American college students. Consistent with the neural efficiency hypothesis, pupillary responses (indexing mental effort) and detection accuracy scores on a visual backward-masking task were both significantly related to the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) Full Scale scores. These measures of information processing efficiency were similar in the two groups. However, they were related only to Caucasian American, but not to a comparable sample of Mexican American, students' WAIS-R scores. Therefore, the differential validity in prediction suggests that the WAIS-R test may contain cultural influences that reduce the validity of the WAIS-R as a measure of cognitive ability for Mexican American students. Information processing and psychophysiological approaches may be helpful in developing culture-fair cognitive ability measures.     

Measurement variability in infant and maternal behavioral assessment

Evaluations of methodological assessments sometimes show similar, sometimes different patterns of findings reflective of different approaches to the same problem. In this study, frequencies of behaviors of infants and mothers in two cultures based on continuous coding were compared with frequencies based on time-sampling, and resulting patterns of findings were evaluated. Time-sampling and continuous coding give different estimates of absolute frequency of typical infant and maternal behaviors between individuals and between cultural groups. However, time-sampling adequately preserves the relative ranking of infant and mother behaviors among individuals and between cultural groups. If research is concerned with the relative standing of individuals and/or groups on frequency of infant or maternal behavior, then (under specified circumstances) time-sampling and continuous coding yield comparable results.     

Trajectory of cognitive science and psychological assessment: current status and expectations

Salient commonalities and distinctions of the set of contributions to this special section are synthesized and discussed. The examination provides a springboard for observations on future developments in cognitive-science applications. Issues considered include imminence and nature of clinical implementation, prediction of selected client transactions outside the assessment context, integration with complementing modes of clinical assessment, and reciprocal information sharing by clinical and nonclinical cognitive scientists.     

A cognitive assessment of highly superior autobiographical memory

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is characterised as the ability to accurately recall an exceptional number of experiences and their associated dates from events occurring throughout much of one's lifetime. The source of this ability has only begun to be explored. The present study explores whether other enhanced cognitive processes may be critical influences underlying HSAM abilities. We investigated whether enhanced abilities in the domains of verbal fluency, attention/inhibition, executive functioning, mnemonic discrimination, perception, visual working memory, or the processing of and memory for emotional details might contribute critically to HSAM. The results suggest that superior cognitive functioning is an unlikely basis of HSAM, as only modest advantages were found in only a few tests. In addition, we examined HSAM subjects’ memory of the testing episodes. Interestingly, HSAM participants recalled details of their own experiences far better than those experiences that the experimenter shared with them. These findings provide additional evidence that HSAM involves, relatively selectively, recollection of personal, autobiographical material.     

Assessor cognitive processes in an operational assessment center

The purpose of this study was (a) to provide additional tests of C. E. Lance, Newbolt, et al.'s (2000) situational specificity (vs. method bias) interpretation of exercise effects on assessment center postexercise dimension ratings and (b) to provide competitive tests of salient dimension versus general impression models of assessor within-exercise evaluations of candidate performance. Results strongly support the situational specificity hypothesis and the general impression model of assessor cognitive processes in which assessors first form overall evaluations of candidate performance that then drive more specific dimensional ratings.     

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.     

Development of using experimenter-given cues in infant chimpanzees: longitudinal changes in behavior and cognitive development

The use of gaze shifts as social cues has various evolutionary advantages. To investigate the developmental processes of this ability, we conducted an object-choice task by using longitudinal methods with infant chimpanzees tested from 8 months old until 3 years old. The experimenter used one of six gestures towards a cup concealing food; tapping, touching, whole-hand pointing, gazing plus close-pointing, distant-pointing, close-gazing, and distant-gazing. Unlike any other previous study, we analyzed the behavioral changes that occurred before and after choosing the cup. We assumed that pre-choice behavior indicates the development of an attentional and spatial connection between a pointing cue and an object (e.g. Woodward, 2005); and post-choice behavior indicates the emergence of object permanence (e.g. Piaget, 1954). Our study demonstrated that infant chimpanzees begin to use experimenter-given cues with age (after 11 months of age). Moreover, the results from the behavioral analysis showed that the infants gradually developed the spatial link between the pointing as an object-directed action and the object. Moreover, when they were 11 months old, the infants began to inspect the inside of the cup, suggesting the onset of object permanence. Overall, our results imply that the ability to use the cues is developing and mutually related with other cognitive developments. The present study also suggests what the standard object-choice task actually measures by breaking the task down into the developmental trajectories of its component parts, and describes for the first time the social-physical cognitive development during the task with a longitudinal method.     

From infant to child: the dynamics of cognitive change in the second year of life

The authors review several key areas of early cognitive development in which an abrupt shift in ability at the end of the second year of life has been traditionally assumed. These areas include deferred imitation, self-recognition, language, and categorization. Contrary to much conventional theorizing, the evidence shows robust continuities in all domains of early cognitive development. Where there is evidence of a reorganization of behavior that makes a new level of performance possible, dynamic-systems analyses indicate that even these may be driven by underlying processes that are continuous. Although there remain significant definitional and methodological issues to be resolved, the outcome of this review augers well for newer models in which cognitive development is viewed as a continuous, dynamic process.     

Mothers' perceptions of infant affect in a croatian sample: The IFEEL pictures assessment

Recent work demonstrates systematic variability in mothers' perceptions of infant affects in adolescent, depressed, abusive, and preterm mothers (Emde, Osofsky,&Butterfield, 1993). This Croatian study, completed before the war in the former Yugoslavia, reports cultural differences and similarities in mothers' interpretation of infant affect in 103 mothers of healthy, full-term Croatian infants when compared to an American sample. The IFEEL Pictures (IFP) were administered to assess mothers' perception and interpretation of infants' facial expressions. Comparisons of the IFP scores for Croatian and American mothers revealed significant differences in 3 of 12 affect categories, controlling for education. Croatian mothers with different educational backgrounds showed significant differences in their perceptions of infants' affects. Differences between American mothers and Croatian educated mothers were less marked than those between Croatian high-educated and low-educated mothers. Our work suggests that there are cultural differences and similarities in affect interpretation between Croatian and American mothers. If this finding holds, it suggests that studies are needed of the effects if any, on mother-child interaction and child-rearing patterns, and possible differences in cross-cultural affect development.