Research on antecedents of organized attachment has focused on the quality of caregiving received during childhood. In recent years, research has begun to examine the influence of genetic factors on quality of infant attachment. However, no published studies report on the association between specific genetic factors and adult attachment. This…

Despite being ignored, visual distractors often produce traceable negative priming (NP) effects that can be used to investigate inhibitory processes. Robust NP effects are typically found with young adults, but not with children. Using 2 different NP tasks, the authors compared NP in 5 different age groups spanning 5 to 25 years of age. The 1st…

Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that…

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad…

Adverse childhood events can influence the development of emotional and physiological self-regulatory abilities, with significant consequences for vulnerability to psychological and physical illness. This study evaluated stress sensitization and inoculation models of the impact of early parental death on stress exposure and reactivity in late…

Children and adults often judge that the side effects of the actions of an uncaring story agent have been intentional if the effects are harmful but not if these are beneficial, creating an asymmetrical "side-effect" effect. The authors report 3 experiments involving 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 188) designed to clarify the role of foreknowledge and…

This article examines Gene x Environment (G x E) interactions in two comorbid developmental disorders--reading disability (RD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)--as a window on broader issues on G x E interactions in developmental psychology. The authors first briefly review types of G x E interactions, methods for detecting…

Genetic factors dynamically interact with both pre- and postnatal environmental influences to shape development. Considerable attention has been devoted to gene-environment interactions (G x E) on important outcomes (A. Caspi & T. E. Moffitt, 2006). It is also important to consider the possibility that these G x E effects may vary across…

The vitamin A derivative retinoic acid (RA) regulates the transcription of about a 6th of the human genome. Compelling evidence indicates a role of RA in cognitive activities, but its integration with the molecular mechanisms of higher brain functions is not known. Here we describe the properties of RA signaling in the mouse, which point to…

The authors review a viewpoint on human functional brain development, interactive specialization (IS), and its application to the emerging network of cortical regions referred to as the "social brain." They advance the IS view in 2 new ways. First, they extend IS into a domain to which it has not previously been applied--the emergence of social…

Social life rests in large part on the capacity to understand the intentions behind the behavior of others. What are the origins of this capacity? How is one to construe its development in ontogenesis? By assuming that action understanding can be explained only in terms of the ability to read the minds of others--that is, to represent mental…

How the memory of adults evolves from the memory abilities of infants is a central problem in cognitive development. The popular solution holds that the multiple memory systems of adults mature at different rates during infancy. The "early-maturing system" (implicit or nondeclarative memory) functions automatically from birth, whereas the…

This article argues that one dominant position in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy about how genetic disorders point to the innate specification of dissociated modules in the human brain should be replaced by a dynamic, neuroconstructivist approach in which genes, brain, cognition, and environment interact multidirectionally.…

In recognition of the multiple pathways through which family and peer systems are linked, this short-term longitudinal study tested a tripartite model of family-peer relationships. One hundred fifty-nine fourth-grade children (82 boys, 77 girls) and their parents participated in a study of the links between parent behaviors and children's peer…

This study investigated vowel length discrimination in infants from 2 language backgrounds, Japanese and English, in which vowel length is either phonemic or nonphonemic. Experiment 1 revealed that English 18-month-olds discriminate short and long vowels although vowel length is not phonemically contrastive in English. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed…