Using epistemic perspectives as a theoretical framework, this study investigated Australian pre-service teachers' perspectives about knowing, knowledge and children's learning, as they engaged in a semester-long unit on philosophy in the classroom. During the field experience component of the unit, pre-service teachers were required to…

Children's early social experiences shape their developing neurological and biological systems for good or for ill, writes Ross Thompson, and the kinds of stressful experiences that are endemic to families living in poverty can alter children's neurobiology in ways that undermine their health, their social competence, and their ability…

Background: The high prevalence of attention problems in children warrants concern, as it is a risk factor for internalizing and externalizing problems. There lies a need to understand possible factors that may mediate this link so that interventions may be targeted to alleviate these mediators and interrupt the link between attention problems and…

Early intervention takes its form from a variety of fields. It has its obvious roots in the fields that primarily provide early intervention services--special education, allied health, and early childhood education. Early intervention also draws from public health as a coordinated approach to addressing the biological, psychological, and social…

Olivia Lima writes in this article that because she is not trained as a therapist or counselor, but rather as a researcher in cognitive development, she cannot speak to the clinical role of empathy. However she does consider empathy central to her work teaching Child Psychology. Keeping that in mind, she begins her first class by telling the…

In this response to commentaries, the author states that she chose the term "revolution" because it comes from the Latin word "revolutio," which means "a turn around." Leading researchers in the early 20th century were advocating that young children were mathematically inept and that mathematics education was useless before elementary school…

Background: Prediction of antisocial behavior is important, given its adverse impact on both the individuals engaging in antisocial behavior and society. Additional research identifying early predictors of future antisocial behavior, or antisocial propensity, is needed. The present study tested the hypothesis that both concern for others and…

This article describes our state of knowledge regarding the development and prevention of conduct problems in early childhood, then identifies directions that would benefit future basic and applied research. Our understanding about the course and risk factors associated with early-developing conduct problems has been significantly enhanced during…

Young children answer many questions every day. The extent to which they do this in an adult-like way -- following Grice's Maxim of Quantity by providing the requested information, no more no less -- has been studied very little. In an experiment, we found that two-, three- and four-year-old children are quite skilled at answering…

Previous studies have reported that infants selectively reproduce observed actions and have argued that this selectivity reflects understanding of intentions and goals, or goal-directed imitation. We reasoned that if selective imitation of goal-directed actions reflects understanding of intentions, infants should demonstrate stability across…

Previous research has shown indirectly that infants may use two different mechanisms-an object tracking system and an analog magnitude mechanism--to represent small (less than 4) and large (greater than or equal to 4) numbers of objects, respectively. The current study directly tested this hypothesis in an ordinal choice task by presenting 10- to…

Children and adolescents encounter different hurtful experiences in school settings. How these events are processed (e.g., whether they think that the transgressor was hostile) is likely to depend on the relationship with the transgressor. In this study, we examined how adolescents (58 girls and 35 boys, mean age = 14.03 years, SD = 0.60) dealt…

This study examined the strategic use of questions to solve problems across early childhood. Participants (N = 54, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds) engaged in two tasks: a novel problem-solving question task that required asking questions to an informant to determine which card in an array was located in a box and a cognitive flexibility task that…

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and…

Age differences in rates of forced confabulation and memory consequences thereof were assessed using a recall task similar to real forensic interview procedures. Children viewed a target video and were tested with the same 18 questions immediately afterward and 1 week later. Of the 18 questions, 12 were answerable; the 6 unanswerable questions…