Standardized psychological assessment provides a precise yet limited view of the neuropsychological status of preschool toddlers, whose brain functioning is only beginning to develop localized functioning. Yet, referrals for preschool evaluation of these early-age children often request a wide variety of information about brain-behavior…

The use of gaze shifts as social cues has various evolutionary advantages. To investigate the developmental processes of this ability, we conducted an object-choice task by using longitudinal methods with infant chimpanzees tested from 8 months old until 3 years old. The experimenter used one of six gestures towards a cup concealing food; tapping,…

Fourteen-month-old infants saw an object hidden inside a container and were removed from the disappearance locale for 24 hr. Upon their return, they searched correctly for the hidden object, demonstrating object permanence and long-term memory. Control infants who saw no disappearance did not search. In Experiment 2, infants returned to see the…

Three longitudinal studies were conducted to examine the generalization of detour ability across motor responses and barrier types, and to investigate the relationship between the development of object permanence and detour ability. Results were discussed in terms of differences in reaching and locomotor detour performances. (Author/CI)

Corman and Escalona's scales for Object Permanence and Spatial Relationships were administered to 98 severely and profoundly retarded children on three occasions, with intervals of six months between successive administrations. The findings demonstrated the high stability of the scales when environmental conditions are themselves highly stable.…

Scales for object permanence and spatial relationships were administered to 98 severely and profoundly mentally retarded children (mean age 13 years) on three occasions, 6 months apart. Differences in the difficulty of the items were quite stable, but their order of difficulty differed appreciably from that for nonretarded infants. (Author/SB)

Investigated the possibility that previous reports of a relation between locomotor status and stage-4 object permanence performance could be generalized to performance on an object localization task. Findings suggest that the effects of locomotor experience on infants' search performance are quite specific and mediated by a variety of factors that…

The paper describes an approach for identifying intervention strategies, techniques, procedures, and activities designed to enhance the developmental competencies of handicapped, mentally retarded, developmentally disabled, and at risk children (birth to 4 years of age). Curriculum procedures are classified according to domains of intervention and…

Twenty congenitally blind infants were placed in a panelled framework with various tactile and auditory objects for 20-minute periods. Results indicated that subjects improved their performance of spatially related activities when exposed to an environment helping them understand the concept and permanence of objects and the production of…

The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball…

Visual attention both guides and is guided by learning and memory systems. In this article, we use a multiple-memory systems framework to examine the interplay between attention and memory that begins in early postnatal life. We review how attention and memory interact to support infant development with respect to perceptual learning about objects…

Three experiments that demonstrate a novel constraint on infants' language skills are described. Across the experiments it is shown that as babies near their 1st birthday, their ability to respond to talk about an absent object is influenced by a referent's spatiotemporal history: familiarizing infants with an object in 1 or several nontest…

Expectancy-based localized attention has been shown to promote the formation and retrieval of multisensory memories in adults. Three experiments show that these processes also characterize attention and learning in 16- to 18-month old infants and, moreover, that these processes may play a critical role in supporting early object name learning. The…

The issue of whether young children use spatio-temporal information (e.g., movement of objects through time and space) and/or contact-mechanical information (e.g., interaction between objects) to search for a hidden object was investigated. To determine whether one cue can have priority over the other, a dynamic event that put these cues into…

The ability to track moving objects, a crucial skill for mature performance on everyday spatial tasks, has been hypothesized to require a specialized mechanism that may be available in infancy (i.e. indexes). Consistent with the idea of specialization, our previous work showed that object tracking was more impaired than a matched spatial memory…