A-not-B task

This study explores parental ethnotheories of children's temperament through mothers' responses to McDevitt and Carey's Behavioral Style Questionnaire (1978) for 299 children aged 3 to 8 years and interviews with their parents, in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. We first established a standardized, "derived etic" version of the questionnaire with adequate reliability for 8 of the original 9 scales. Cross-cultural comparisons of the scales' means showed generally similar perceptions of children's behavior. However, intercorrelations of the mean ratings with each other and with global "difficulty, " as presented through multidimensional scaling, showed both general tendencies and culturespecific patterns, which are further illustrated by parental discourse about "difficult" children in each sample. The findings underline the importance of parental ethnotheories for shaping the expression of temperament in development.

This study explores parental ethnotheories of children's temperament through mothers' responses to McDevitt and Carey's Behavioral Style Questionnaire (1978) for 299 children aged 3 to 8 years and interviews with their parents, in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. We first established a standardized, "derived etic" version of the questionnaire with adequate reliability for 8 of the original 9 scales. Cross-cultural comparisons of the scales' means showed generally similar perceptions of children's behavior. However, intercorrelations of the mean ratings with each other and with global "difficulty, " as presented through multidimensional scaling, showed both general tendencies and culturespecific patterns, which are further illustrated by parental discourse about "difficult" children in each sample. The findings underline the importance of parental ethnotheories for shaping the expression of temperament in development.

This study explores parental ethnotheories of children's temperament through mothers' responses to McDevitt and Carey's Behavioral Style Questionnaire (1978) for 299 children aged 3 to 8 years and interviews with their parents, in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. We first established a standardized, "derived etic" version of the questionnaire with adequate reliability for 8 of the original 9 scales. Cross-cultural comparisons of the scales' means showed generally similar perceptions of children's behavior. However, intercorrelations of the mean ratings with each other and with global "difficulty, " as presented through multidimensional scaling, showed both general tendencies and culturespecific patterns, which are further illustrated by parental discourse about "difficult" children in each sample. The findings underline the importance of parental ethnotheories for shaping the expression of temperament in development.

The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multi-cultural and multi-racial schools in the London (UK) boroughs City of London and Harrow. A quarter of children in both schools were eligible for free school meals (national average 18.5%). The same 3 x 3 grid with nine individually colored places and a uniform black star as placeholder was tested in three different retrieval conditions: (1) same array as during presentation, (2) one place at a time with placeholder, and (3) one place at a time without placeholder. In a (4) control condition, individual shapes were of the same color as the colorful places. Bayes Factor analyses showed a more unified response towards figurative placeholders in 5-to 6-year-olds. Independently of age, colorful places without a placeholder were hardest to remember. Places were better remembered when a placeholder was added and still better when the spatial context of the entire array was available. Yet unique shapes with distinctive contours and colors as placeholders optimized place memory the most. While place memory accuracy increased with age, reaction times did not become faster. Instead, latencies were longer, the more visual information was available in the retrieval array. A larger perceptual effect was caused by the dynamic where-delay interference task, the sparser the amount of visual information in the retrieval array.

Impulsivity and inattention are key constructs at the interface of temperament and domains of childhood behavioral problems, such as ADHD and ODD. A multi-method, multi-source assessment of impulsivity and inattention was conducted with 256 families of twins at a mean age of 8-9 years from an epidemiologically defined community sample. Analysis of 20 impulsivity, inattention, and related behavior-problem measures yielded a single principal component, which could also be decomposed into five narrower factors. These narrower factors distinguished inattention and impulsivity content from more defiant content, and split the domain by method of assessment. Males scored significantly higher on factors related directly to impulsivity and inattention. Lower socioeconomic status also predicted impulsivity and inattention, as well as defiance and aggression, and lower IQ modestly predicted impulsivity and inattention. Biometric analyses showed that these multi-source measures of childhood impulsivity and inattention were highly heritable, with genetic variance accounting for 70-80% of the phenotypic variance in many of the models. Shared environmental factors were generally not influential, and nonshared environmental effects were stronger for males than for females for inattention/impulsivity. These results suggest that impulsivity and inattention during this period of childhood are (1) clearly related to concurrent aggressive/defiant symptoms; (2) multidimensional, with influences of method of assessment on outcome; and (3) highly heritable, with possible gender differences in the strength of genetic effects.

This study explores parental ethnotheories of children's temperament through mothers' responses to McDevitt and Carey's Behavioral Style Questionnaire (1978) for 299 children aged 3 to 8 years and interviews with their parents, in Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. We first established a standardized, "derived etic" version of the questionnaire with adequate reliability for 8 of the original 9 scales. Cross-cultural comparisons of the scales' means showed generally similar perceptions of children's behavior. However, intercorrelations of the mean ratings with each other and with global "difficulty, " as presented through multidimensional scaling, showed both general tendencies and culturespecific patterns, which are further illustrated by parental discourse about "difficult" children in each sample. The findings underline the importance of parental ethnotheories for shaping the expression of temperament in development.

Grouping by luminance and shape similarity has previously been demonstrated in neonates and at 4 months, respectively. By contrast, grouping by proximity has hitherto not been investigated in infancy. Th is is also the fi rst study to chart the developmental emergence of perceptual grouping longitudinally. Sixty-one infants were presented with a matrix of local stimuli grouped horizontally or vertically by luminance, shape or proximity at 2, 4, and 6 months. Infants were exposed to each set of stimuli for three presentation durations. Grouping was demonstrated for luminance similarity at the earliest testing age, 2 months, by shape similarity at 4 months, but was not observed for grouping by proximity. Grouping by shape similarity showed a distinctive pattern of grouping ability across exposure durations, which refl ected familiarity preferences followed by novelty preferences. Th is remained stable across age. No link was found between the emergence of perceptual grouping ability and the exposure duration required to elicit grouping. We conclude by stressing the importance of longitudinal studies of infant development in furthering our understanding of human cognition, rather than relying on assumptions from the adult endstate.

Currently there are disputes in the infancy literature concerning when infants are first able to individuate physical objects by their features or properties. This issue has taken on new significance following claims that individuation by feature is linked to the emergence of object kind concepts toward the end of the first year. Needham (2001, this issue) presents evidence that infants as young as 4.5 months old can individuate objects by feature. We locate this controversy within the framework of brain mechanisms that index or track individual objects, drawing upon theories of attention and working memory developed in the study of adults. We find that Needham's work contributes to two issues: categorization and the effect of object history on the individuation of objects in a complex display. It used to be thought that infants were incapable of mentally representing physical objects. For Piaget (1955) this incapacity was a hallmark of the entire period of infancy, a cognitively primitive stage in which the mind could only grasp that which was currently " present to the senses. " The problem with objects is that they are three-dimensional volumes in three-dimensional space. This means, given the laws of physics and probability, that most of the time most of the objects in the world are bound to be out of reach, out of ear shot, and invisible. The odd, idio-syncratic object will cohabit our arbitrary, personal sector of time and space but even these will only occasionally emerge into view or come within reach. Despite this unpromising backdrop, we all rapidly converge on identical views concerning the objective and universal nature of physical objects, their mode of existence, their kinds and causal powers, assigning to each an individual and enduring identity. The problem of how this rapid convergence takes place has exercised thinkers for many generations but it is only within the past several decades that we have begun to make real empirical progress. Piaget believed that the key to this problem was the capacity to conceive of objects as enduring through their periods of concealment. The trick was to represent an image of the object to yourself in its absence so as to mimic its continued presence. Bower (1967, 1974) rejected Piaget's focus on permanence and

Novelty seeking is viewed as adaptive, and novelty preferences in infancy predict cognitive performance into adulthood. Yet 7-month-olds prefer familiar stimuli to novel ones when searching for hidden objects, in contrast to their strong novelty preferences with visible objects . According to a graded representations perspective on object knowledge, infants gradually develop stronger object representations through experience, such that representations of familiar objects can be better maintained, supporting greater search than with novel objects. Object representations should strengthen with further development to allow older infants to shift from familiarity to novelty preferences with hidden objects. The current study tested this prediction by presenting 24 11-month-olds with novel and familiar objects that were sometimes visible and sometimes hidden. Unlike 7-month-olds, 11-month-olds showed novelty preferences with both visible and hidden objects. This developmental shift from familiarity to novelty preference with hidden objects parallels one that infants show months earlier with perceptible stimuli, but the two transitions may reflect different underlying mechanisms. The current findings suggest both change and continuity in the adaptive development of object representations and associated cognitive processes.

The study investigates the relationship between array priming and the self-generated conceptualization of arrays in spatial memory. Nursery and primary school age children and adults (N = 70) were tested with an object and place memory reaction-time/accuracy task, once first using a frame (containment and figurative thought) and (in another session) using a grid (explicit boundaries around places). They were also given the Common Region Test (CRT) with which drawing of object-place vs. object-region binding was tested. Object memory was better than place memory in 5-year-olds, but place memory had caught up in older children. Ten-year-olds showed already an accuracy comparable to young adults, and they also remembered places somewhat better and faster than object shapes. Experiencing the explicitly denoted places in the grid in the first session improved place memory in the second session with the frame, but not vice versa. Object-place binding in the CRT predicted better object than place memory, while object-region binding predicted place memory equal to or better than object memory. These binding strategies statistically eliminated the array priming effects of the grid, showing a trade-off between “self-made” spatial encoding strategy and priming with a “ready-made” spatial array structure.

Bjork and Cummings (1984) showed that in the AB task infants aim for the correct place but search in adjacent places. In repeated trials, infants center and adjust their search to the correct hiding location. Re-analyses of previous research (Bremner,  1978; Bremner  & Bryant, 1977) showed that  infants  close the gap between search in location A and B by selectively improving search in location B between the second and the third trial. In the present study, it was hypothesized that breast-fed infants would  be better prepared to focus, i.e. center and improve selectively in the AB task. It was found that indeed breast-fed infants showed the same learning pattern, while bottle-fed infants did not. In addition, it could be observed that search in location A showed a trade-off with search in location B, which was the larger the more constrained the cognitive system, i.e. the younger the  infants.  It  is  suggested that  sensitivity  to  familiarity enhances selective improvement of sustained attention for the pathway of an object in the AB task.

The A-not-B task is a marker task for infant development where an infant searches for an object being hidden twice, in two consecutive places. In two studies N = 70 infants plus 40 controls were tested in this task using two separate, infant-sized tables. In the first study, the separate tables were joined in front of the infant to form one area. No facilitation effect occurred. In the second study, an air gap was left between tables which facilitated search, but no learning transfer occurred. Results are discussed on the background of object-place binding theory (Treisman, 2006a, b): Initially object-place binding is taking place, which then needs to be dissociated, if the object must be bound to a new, second place. Th us infants need to switch from an object priority to a place priority. An object and place association-dissociation-association binding model (ADA) of spatial learning integrates object-based (object permanence) with space-based accounts of the A-not-B task.

Previous research showed that drawing facilitates memory (Bruck, Melnyk, & Ceci, 2000; Butler, Gross, & Hayne, 1995; Gross & Hayne, 1999). The current study investigated whether drawing strategies could predict spatial memory. Children show a developmental change from drawing object-place binding (object-based coding) to object-region binding (spacebased coding) when constructing spatial boundaries around matching Wertheimer stimuli (Common Region Test [CRT], Lange-Küttner, 2006). In the present sample, girls showed the predicted age difference —from object-place to object-region binding—in the CRT. However, a U-shaped development for object-region binding was revealed in boys, with already most of the 6-year-old boys showing this type of spatial binding. Object-place binding was mainly used by boys from low socio-economic (SES) background. Boys’ spatial memory was more improved when they showed object-region binding than girls’ spatial memory. However, girls had closed the gap between object and place memory already at age 8, while this was the case in boys only at age 10. Multiple regression analyses revealed that socio-economic status (SES) was a more powerful predictor for spatial memory than age in boys, but not in girls. There were no gender differences in spatial encoding and memory in the group of 10-year-olds. It is suggested that gender-specific preferences for object-place and object-region binding were absent at age 10 because unit-based and region based spatial coding may merge like the parallel discrete and continuous number systems which become integrated with age (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004).