This review of 20 years of developmental research on Executive Functions (EF) offers a broad-brushstroke picture that touches on multiple issues including: (i) findings from typical and atypical groups, from infancy to adolescence; (ii) advances in assessment tools and in statistical analysis; (iii) the interplay between EF and other cognitive…

This paper provides a brief overview of recent developmental research on themes related to children's social identities. Initially, consideration is given to the capacity for social categorization, following which attention is given to children's developing conceptions of social identities, their identification with social groups, and the…

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.…

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be effectively used to record fetal and neonatal cognitive abilities/functions by recording completely non-invasively the magnetic fields produced by the active neurons in the brain. During the last trimester and the first months of life, the cognitive capabilities related to emotion recognition and language…

The aim of the present study was to develop and provide a preliminary evaluation of a social-skills-based early intervention program specifically designed to assist extremely inhibited preschoolers. Participants were a sample of n = 522 extremely inhibited preschool-aged children, who were randomly assigned to either the "Social Skills…

Because child abuse victims are often the only available sources of information about their experiences, extensive efforts have been made to understand how to maximize their informativeness. There is now broad international consensus regarding optimal interview practices, and broad awareness that children's informativeness increases when…

The present study evaluated two primary care parenting interventions. First, we evaluated the most widely used Dutch practices for primary care parenting support. Second, we assessed the applicability of the Primary Care Triple P approach, which is now being utilized in a wide variety of primary care settings. Both interventions target parents of…

Two studies extended psychometric research on the Student-Teacher Relationship Scale (STRS) with kindergarten and preschool children (N[subscript 1] = 60-7[subscript 1]; N[subscript 2] = 35) and their teachers. These studies used a multi-method approach to replicate and extend previous findings concerning the convergent validity of the STRS…

Interesting systems, whether biological or artificial, develop. Starting from some initial conditions, they respond to environmental changes, and continuously improve their capabilities. Developmental psychologists have dedicated significant effort to studying the developmental progression of infant imitation skills, because imitation underlies…

Despite the increasing use of the microgenetic methodology to examine change, the techniques employed to analyse microgenetic data remain fairly unsophisticated. This paper reviews the existing ways of analysing such data and describes their limitations. We use two recent studies to illustrate how modelling can avoid these problems and reveal…

Very young infants are sensitive to and follow other people's gaze. By 18 months children, like chimpanzees, apparently represent the spatial relationship between viewer and object viewed: they can follow eye-direction alone, and react appropriately if the other's gaze is blocked by occluding barriers. This paper assesses when children represent…

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…

Imitation offers a gateway to relationship. This paper seeks to explore that capacity by describing the therapeutic approach of "Intensive Interaction". The research literature on imitation contains relatively little about imitation used in an intervention capacity, concentrating instead on the emergence of imitative abilities during infant and…

Studying normal infant development is a challenge for cognitive scientists in general and for neuroscientists in particular because: (1) physiological indices of infant cognition are generally noisy and technically difficult to obtain; and (2) interindividual variability and a paucity of established results make data interpretation very complex,…