Development of differentiation between writing and drawing systems.

When does a writing system emerge out of children's drawing to separate (a) script processing and production from (b) picture processing and production? And does one system's activation help or hinder the other system's operation? Children 4-12 years of age wrote repeated Os and Vs and drew matching shapes, in the contexts of script and of pictures. The technique elicits matching products in order to identify differences between production kinematics in different contexts. A transition occurred around age 6 in which (a) production was more fluent for writing than drawing and (b) activation of one system interfered with the other. Modeling the consolidation of both phenomena generated testable parameters for the slow approach to the adult steady state, involving increasing specialization and the waning of the need for suppression of the two systems' interference.

Regulation of division of labour between cognitive systems controlling action.

The brain has evolved a division of labour amongst component systems which link different sorts of processing with precise actions. Debate is over centralized versus decentralized control at different processing levels, from cognitive systems to motor-control systems. With simultaneous activation of alternative expert systems which link (a) picture-processing with drawing and (b) reading with writing, decentralized modelling predicted both the averaging of action-production times and additive effects of neural noise. Such modelling has the advantage of being able to measure the cost of regulation both within and between systems, in a common metric of performance variability. That commonality strengthens the trend to regard the brain as a distributed super-system with a great deal of regulation done towards the output end.

Representation of the cardinality principle: early conception of error in a counterfactual test.

There is debate over how the integration of non-verbal quantifying and verbal counting relates to the representation of number principles. A stringent representational test would be one in which a child obeyed a number principle where it ran counter to a characteristic procedure. We devised a test relying on the uniqueness principle for using evidence from a miscount in inferring a counterfactual cardinal number. All the 5-year-olds passed, as did half the preschoolers. Subtests probed associated number-skills. We suggest that a crucial preschool step is to start conceptualising error by categorising relations between counting and miscounting. That step is taken at a similar age to passing a representational theory of mind test but the two were uncorrelated.

Social influences on false belief access: specific sibling influences or general apprenticeship?

Some recent studies have found a relation between the number of siblings 3-4-year-old children have and their performance on false belief tasks. 2 experiments reported here examine a variety of factors in children's social environments, including daily contact with peers and adults as well as the numbers of their siblings, on a battery of false belief tests. In Experiment 1, 82 preschoolers were studied in Rethymnon, Crete, in order to obtain a range of extended kin available as a resource for the child. In Experiment 2, 75 Cypriot preschoolers were studied in Nicosia in order to examine the influences of each child's daily social contacts, as measured by maternal questionnaire. Logistic regression revealed that the factors which account for most of the predicted variance on the theory of mind tests were (a) the number of adult kin available (Experiment 1) or adults interacted with daily (Experiment 2), (b) the child's age, (c) the number of older siblings a child has, and (d) the number of older children interacted with daily. The results suggested that theory of mind is not simply passed from one sibling to another in a process of social influence. It seems more likely that a variety of knowledgeable members of her or his culture influence the apprentice theoretician of mind.

Disturbed mother-infant interaction in association with congenital heart disease.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether difficulties are experienced in the interaction between infants with congenital heart disease and their mothers and to identify infants who show compromised emotional development, in order to offer intervention during the early stages of postoperative compensatory growth. METHODS: 20 infants and their mothers were compared with 20 non-cardiac mother-infant pairs. Infants were filmed in interaction for 30 minutes two days before and six months after corrective surgery. Fifteen minutes of film were analysed in 180 5-s units. The emotional tone (affect) and the interpersonal engagement were classified as positive or negative by prespecified criteria. The percentages of positive scores were analysed. The mental health of the mothers was also assessed. RESULTS: Cardiac infants showed less positive affect and engagement than the noncardiac group at both sessions. There was no correlation between of positive affect or engagement and the severity of the condition in either group. Cardiac mothers showed less positive affect and engagement than the comparison group, and were psychologically distressed at both sessions. The engagement scores of the mothers of the cardiac infants were also more variable. CONCLUSIONS: Cardiac infants and their mothers have lower levels of positive affect and engagement than non-cardiac mother-infant pairs. Thus some mothers are unable to adapt to their infant. This leads to disordered interaction which is maintained at six months. This information can be used to offer intervention during the early stages of postoperative compensatory growth.

Making explicit 3-year-olds' implicit competence with their own false beliefs.

Three-year-olds usually fail to recall a previous false belief once they have discovered the true state of affairs. The failure is so dramatic that researchers have treated it as a case of functional retrograde amnesia. We found in a series of studies that the memory trace is indeed available but is inaccessible under traditional testing procedures. We also provided a new prediction that reminding children that they had briefly held a picture of an object would be a more powerful retrieval cue than a reminder that they had held the small object itself. It was further shown that an effective picture was one that reminded children of the content of the target belief and not one that would enable them to reconstruct the contextual cause of why they had held the belief--a case of "recall without insight". However, there was evidence that successful recall was associated with either (a) an insight that the recall was of a thought rather than of a pretence (delayed post-test technique) or (b) a readiness to attach a mentalistic label to the recall (immediate post-test technique). The results serve to narrow an assessment of the competence gap between 3- and 4-year-olds in recall of their own false belief. Rather than a sudden ability to preserve the memory in association with insight into its informational origins, it is only the latter that comes on stream in 4-year-olds. Alternative explanations of the picture facilitation effect suggest different research strategies, each of which aims at a gap in current formulations of false belief recall.

Phonological awareness and literacy development in children with expressive phonological impairments.

This study investigated the link between expressive phonological impairments, phonological awareness, and literacy. Previous investigations of literacy skills in children with speech impairments have given mixed results; here we considered whether presence of additional language impairments or severity of the speech impairment was an important prognostic factor. Thirty-one children with expressive phonological impairments were compared with control children matched on age and nonverbal ability on three occasions, at mean ages of 70, 79, and 91 months. On each occasion they were given three tests of phonological awareness: one involved rime-matching and two involved onset-matching. At assessments 2 and 3 literacy skills were assessed. Children with phonological impairments scored well below their controls on phonological awareness and literacy, independent of whether or not they had other language problems. Although many of them knew letter sounds, they were poor at reading and writing nonwords as well as real words. It is suggested that both the speech impairment and the literacy problems arise from a failure to analyze syllables into smaller phonological units. The severity of the phonological problems in relation to age is an important determinant of literacy outcome; children who have severe expressive phonological impairments at the time they start school are at particular risk for reading and spelling problems.

Infant search strategies with containers that move but do not alter the location at which contents can be found.

A number of hypotheses about infants' delayed search accuracy have been based upon the notion that a location associated with repeated retrieval of the object attains privileged status. Infants may need strong cues to search at a new location. However, a test is reported in which performance of 12- and 15-month-old infants was shown to be indifferent to the location. The results were reliable at an individual level. The data accord with previous research upon the canonicality effect in infant spatial search, an effect which is taken to index an experiential constraint on spatial discrimination. The experimental design thus serves as a discriminative test between three approaches: the original privileged location hypothesis, a newer spatial-contrast hypothesis, and a wider approach which focuses on experiential constraints on learning, including the canonicality effect.

What is the child's own view in a spatial task?: a spatial by temporal interaction affecting errors in perceptual reports.

Children are sometimes called 'egocentric' on the basis of their performance on Piagetian spatial-inference tasks. They often inappropriately substitute their own perceptual report for another observer's. Little is known about what responses are activated in giving perceptual reports. An experiment is presented which tightly controls spatial and temporal stimulus ordering. One condition elicted reports of that aspect of the display which children could not see instead of what they could see. Explanations are considered on the basis of relational coding and temporal responsiveness.

Temporal and spatial ordering in recall by five- to eight-year-old children.

It has been reported that 8-year-old children, when asked to recall stimuli that had occurred incompatible spatial and temporal orders, spontaneously reproduced the temporal order. In this study with 5-8-year-olds, there was a clear developmental trend in the tendency to reproduce temporal rather than spatial ordering. The results are discussed with reference to previous work on partially deaf and subnormal children.