Human neonates spend the majority of their time sleeping. Despite the limited waking hours available for environmental exploration, the first few months of life are a time of rapid learning about the environment. The organization of neonate sleep differs qualitatively from adult sleep, and the unique characteristics of neonatal sleep may promote…

As thinking adults depend upon years of practical experience, reasoning about facts and causes, and language to sustain their knowledge, beliefs and memories, and to understand one another, it seems quite absurd to suggest that a newborn infant has intersubjective mental capacities. But detailed research on how neonatal selves coordinate the…

Many preschoolers are highly inattentive, impulsive, and hyperactive; but only some are impaired in their functioning. Yet factors leading to functional impairment, above and beyond the severity of inattentive and hyperactive symptoms, have not been systematically examined. This study examined a model suggesting that after controlling for…

Deficits in executive function, and in particular, reduced capacity to inhibit a dominant action, are a risk factor for externalizing problems (EP). Inhibitory control (IC) develops in the later preschool and early childhood periods, such that IC might not regulate EP in toddlers and younger preschoolers. Aggression was observed during peer play…

This paper reviews progress over the past 20 years in four areas of research on infant perception and cognition. Work on perception of dynamic events has identified perceptual constraints on perception of object unity and object trajectory continuity that have led to a perceptual account of early development that supplements Nativist accounts.…

The current study examined the role of maternal behaviour and toddlers' emotion regulation strategies in the development of children's sustained attention abilities. Participants for this study included 447 children (232 girls) obtained from three different cohorts participating in a larger ongoing longitudinal study. When the children were 2…

The developmental model of subjective group dynamics hypothesizes that peer exclusion during middle childhood involves inferences about group dynamics. To test the generality of this prediction, children judged, within minimal groups, peers whose behavior was loyal versus disloyal (Study 1: n = 46, mean age = 113 months) or morally acceptable…

The prospective relationships of conduct problems and peer coercion and deviancy training during kindergarten (mean age = 5.3 years) to overt and covert conduct problems in third-fourth grade were examined in a sample of 267 boys and girls. Coercion and deviancy training were distinct peer processes. Both were associated with earlier child conduct…

The goal of this study was to examine the links among attachment, child temperament, and the quality and frequency of mother-toddler conflict. Sixty-four mothers and children took part in a series of laboratory tasks when the child was 30 months of age and an audio-recorded home observation when the child was 36 months of age. All episodes of…

Trajectories in bullying through adolescence were studied along with individual, family, and peer relationship factors. At the outset, participants' ages ranged from 10 to 14; 74% identified as European Canadian with the remainder from diverse backgrounds. With 8 waves of data over 7 years, 871 students (466 girls and 405 boys) were studied to…

This continuation of a previous study (Taumoepeau & Ruffman, 2006) examined the longitudinal relation between maternal mental state talk to 15- and 24-month-olds and their later mental state language and emotion understanding (N = 74). The previous study found that maternal talk about the child's desires to 15-month-old children uniquely predicted…

Two experiments examined the development of recollection (recalling qualitative details about an event) and familiarity (recognizing the event) using the dual-process signal detection model. In Experiment 1 (n = 117; ages 6, 8, 10, 14, and 18 years), recollection improved from childhood to adolescence after semantic encoding but not after…

The importance of autonomy for children's motivation in collectivistic cultures has been debated hotly. With the understanding that autonomy is not equivalent to freedom of choice, 4 studies addressed this debate by investigating how socioemotional relatedness, choice, and autonomy were related to Chinese children's motivation. Study 1 (N = 56,…

The goal of the present study was to examine whether controlling parenting contributes to the problem of physical aggression. Developmental trajectories of children's physical aggression were modeled from yearly teachers' ratings, from ages 6 to 12. Multinomial logistic regressions (N = 1,508) served to identify risk factors that distinguish…

This study investigates the ability of 6-month-old infants to attend to the continuous properties of a set of discrete entities. Infants were habituated to dot arrays that were constant in cumulative surface area yet varied in number for small (less than 4) or large (greater than 3) sets. Results revealed that infants detected a 4-fold (but not…