In their commentaries, Carver, Richmond and DeBoer pose several challenging and insightful questions in response to our target article. Two key themes emerged from their commentaries, which are important in the field of infant memory research. The first concerns the use of deferred imitation as a paradigm, and its relationship to other methods of…

What capabilities are required for an organism to evince an "explicit" understanding of gaze as a mentalistic phenomenon? One possibility is that mentalistic interpretations of gaze, like concepts of unseen, supernatural beings, are culturally-specific concepts, acquired through cultural learning. These abstract concepts may either require a…

Recent advances in statistical techniques for longitudinal data analysis have provided increased capabilities for elucidating individual differences in trajectories of change in child behaviours and abilities. However, most techniques still assume that there is a single underlying distribution with respect to changes over time, about which…

This manuscript by Connell and Frye ("Infant Child Dev" 2006; 15(6): 609-621) provides a clear example of the application of latent growth mixture models (LGMM) to the development of antisocial behaviour in adolescence. The LGMM approach is discussed in the context of this example, and factors influencing the results achieved with these methods…

A meta-analysis of 41 studies was conducted to examine the strength of the relation between parenting (positive control, negative control and responsiveness) and self-regulation in preschoolers. Results revealed significant associations between both types of parental control and self-regulation, with effect sizes being small in magnitude. There…

Children with developmental delay are at increased risk for behaviour problems, but little is known about risk and resilience factors. Previous research has established links between maternal sensitivity and behaviour problems in typically developing children, but no studies have examined maternal sensitivity in the development of behaviour…

The present study investigated the relation between executive functioning and symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) in children aged 4-6. A population-based sample (n = 201) was used and laboratory measures of inhibition, working memory and verbal fluency and teacher ratings of…

Teaching styles were investigated in 28 middle-class sibling dyads (older sibling M age = 8.2 yrs; younger sibling M age = 5.11 yrs) using two sets of block design tasks (five easy; five hard). Older siblings employed a greater number of strategies (i.e. physical demonstrations, scaffolding, corrective feedback) in the hard than in the easy tasks,…

The aims of the present study were to investigate the role for problematic children of the child's social competence, teacher relations and behaviour with peers for later problem persistence, school performance and peer acceptance, in terms of moderating (protective and exacerbating) and independent effects. Groups of children with externalizing…

Infants can inhibit a prepotent but wrong action towards a goal in order to perform a causal means-action. It is not clear, however, whether infants can perform an arbitrary means-action while inhibiting a prepotent response. In four experiments, we explore this executive functioning in 18-24-month-old children. The working memory and inhibition…

The literature on somatic complaints in children without a clear physical medical cause often demonstrates connections with various psychological factors, such as negative emotions and problems handling them, poor self-image, and coping potential. We entered these elements into a structural model to elucidate the relationships among them and…

The authors of the paper on growth mixture modelling (GMM) give a description of GMM and related techniques as applied to antisocial behaviour. They bring up the important issue of choice of model within the general framework of mixture modelling, especially the choice between latent class growth analysis (LCGA) techniques developed by Nagin and…

Maternal prenatal smoking, birth weight and sociodemographic factors were investigated in relation to cognitive abilities of 1544 children (aged 3.5 years) participating in the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Children's Development. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) was used to assess verbal ability, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale…

All congenitally deafblind people are potential communication partners. The key question for practitioners is how to help them achieve that potential. Imitation offers a particularly powerful means of doing so because it allows both partners to occupy a joint dyadic space, where the process of repairing the damaged communication partnerships that…

How is the transition between intersubjectivity and subjectivity accomplished? While many developmental theorists have argued that social interaction gives rise to individualistic capacities (e.g. representation, language, consciousness), relatively few theorists have attempted to identify the precise mechanisms that might be responsible for this…