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A robust left side cradling bias (LCB) in humans is argued to reflect an evolutionarily old left visual field bias and right hemisphere dominance for processing social stimuli. A left visual field bias for face processing, invoked via the LCB, is known to reflect a human population-level right cerebral hemisphere specialization for processing social stimuli. We explored the relationship between cradling side biases, hand dominance and socio-communicative abilities. Four and five year old typically-developing children (N = 98) participated in a battery of manual motor tasks interspersed by cradling trials comprising a(n): infant human doll, infant primate doll, proto-face pillow and no-face pillow. Mean social and communication ability scores were obtained via a survey completed by each child's key teacher. We found a population-level LCB for holding an infant human doll that was not influenced by hand dominance, sex, age or experience of having a younger sibling. Children demonstrating a LCB, did however, obtain a significantly higher mean social ability score compared with their right side cradling counterparts. Like the infant human doll, the proto-face pillow's schematic face symbol was sufficient to elicit a population-level LCB. By contrast, the infant primate doll elicited a population-level right side cradling bias, influenced by both hand dominance and sex. The findings suggest that the LCB is present and visible early in development and is likely therefore, to represent evolutionarily old domain-specific organization and function of the right cerebral hemisphere. Additionally, results suggest that a LCB requires minimal triggering but can be reversed in some situations, possibly in response to species-type or levels of novelty or stress as perceived by the viewer. Patterns of behavioral biases within the context of social stimuli and their associations with cognitive ability are important for understanding how socio-communication abilities emerge in developing children., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Human adults process and select the opportunities for action in their environment rapidly, efficiently, and effortlessly. While several studies have revealed substantial improvements in object recognition skills, motor abilities, and control over the motor system during late childhood, surprisingly little is known about how object processing for action develops during this period. This study addresses this issue by investigating how the ability to ignore actions potentiated by a familiar utensil develops between ages 6 and 10 years. It is the first study to demonstrate that (1) the mechanisms that transform a graspable visual stimulus into an object-appropriate motor response are in place by the sixth year of life and (2) graspable features of an object can facilitate and interfere with manual responses in an adult-like manner by this age. The results suggest that there may be distinct developmental trajectories for the ability to ignore motor responses triggered by visual affordances and the stimulus response compatibility effects typically assessed with Simon tasks., (© 2013 The British Psychological Society.)

Very few experiments have studied the two item same/different relation in young human infants. This contrasts with an extensive animal literature. We tested young infants with two novel tasks designed specifically to provide convergent comparative measures. Each infant completed both tasks allowing an assessment of their understanding of the abstract concept rather than task-specific abilities. In a looking time task with photographic stimuli, we found that 8-month-olds are sensitive to the relation but 4-month-olds are not. The second task used an anticipatory eye movement paradigm with simple geometric stimuli. On each trial, two colored shapes appear and moved upwards behind an occluder. They reappeared on either the upper left or right depending on the relation between them. Infants at both ages learned and generalized the dependency but only for the different relation. These results show that human infants can learn the same/different concept but that, in strong continuity with animal results, their abilities are firmly grounded in perception.

We measured looking times and ERPs to examine the cognitive and brain bases of perceptual category learning in 6-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, we showed that categorization and exemplar discrimination rely on different cortical processes. Specifically, the repetition of individual exemplars resulted in differential cortical processing at posterior channels at an early stage during object processing (100-300 msec), whereas discriminating among members of different categories was reflected in ERP differences over anterior cortical regions occurring later in time (300-500 msec) than the repetition effects. In Experiment 2, replicating the findings of Study 1, we found that infants engage the same cortical processes to categorize visual objects into basic-level categories, regardless of whether a basic (bird vs. fish) or global level is crossed (birds vs. cars). This pattern of findings is consistent with perceptual accounts of infant categorization [Quinn, P. C., & Eimas, P. D. Perceptual organization and categorization in young infants. In C. Rovee-Collier & L. P. Lipsitt (Eds.), Advances in infancy research ( pp. 1-36). Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1996] and accords with recent adult neural-level models of perceptual categorization.

The development of analogical reasoning has traditionally been understood in terms of theories of adult competence. This approach emphasizes structured representations and structure mapping. In contrast, we argue that by taking a developmental perspective, analogical reasoning can be viewed as the product of a substantially different cognitive ability - relational priming. To illustrate this, we present a computational (here connectionist) account where analogy arises gradually as a by-product of pattern completion in a recurrent network. Initial exposure to a situation primes a relation that can then be applied to a novel situation to make an analogy. Relations are represented as transformations between states. The network exhibits behaviors consistent with a broad range of key phenomena from the developmental literature, lending support to the appropriateness of this approach (using low-level cognitive mechanisms) for investigating a domain that has normally been the preserve of high-level models. Furthermore, we present an additional simulation that integrates the relational priming mechanism with deliberative controlled use of inhibition to demonstrate how the framework can be extended to complex analogical reasoning, such as the data from explicit mapping studies in the literature on adults. This account highlights how taking a developmental perspective constrains the theory construction and cognitive modeling processes in a way that differs substantially from that based purely on adult studies, and illustrates how a putative complex cognitive skill can emerge out of a simple mechanism.

Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition proposes a unifying framework for the study of cognitive development that brings together (1) constructivism (which views development as the progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures), (2) cognitive neuroscience (which aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying behavior), and (3) computational modeling (which proposes formal and explicit specifications of information processing). The guiding principle of our approach is context dependence, within and (in contrast to Marr [1982]) between levels of organization. We propose that three mechanisms guide the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy; which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization. We suggest that the main outcome of development is partial representations, distributed across distinct functional circuits. This framework is derived by examining development at the level of single neurons, brain systems, and whole organisms. We use the terms encellment, embrainment, and embodiment to describe the higher-level contextual influences that act at each of these levels of organization. To illustrate these mechanisms in operation we provide case studies in early visual perception, infant habituation, phonological development, and object representations in infancy. Three further case studies are concerned with interactions between levels of explanation: social development, atypical development and within that, developmental dyslexia. We conclude that cognitive development arises from a dynamic, contextual change in embodied neural structures leading to partial representations across multiple brain regions and timescales, in response to proactively specified physical and social environment.

We present two experiments assessing whether the size of a transformation instantiating a relation between two states of the world (e.g., shrinks) is a performance factor affecting analogical reasoning. The first experiment finds evidence of transformation size as a significant factor in adolescent analogical problem solving while the second experiment finds a similar effect on adult analogical reasoning using a markedly different analogical completion paradigm. The results are interpreted as providing evidence for the more general framework that cognitive representations of relations are best understood as mental transformations.

Under incidental instructions, thirty-eight 2-year-olds were trained on a six-element deterministic sequence of spatial locations. Following training, subjects were informed of the presence of a sequence and asked to either reproduce or suppress the learned material. Children's production of the trained sequence was modulated by these instructions. When asked to suppress the trained sequence, the children were able to increase generation of paths that were not from the training sequence. Their performance was thus dependent on active suppression of knowledge, rather than on a random generation strategy. This degree of control in 2-year-olds stands in stark contrast to 3-year-olds' failure to control explicitly instructed rule-based knowledge (as measured by the dimensional-change card-sort task). We suggest that the incidental nature of a learning episode enables the acquisition of a more procedural form of knowledge with which this age group has more experience prior to the onset of fluent language.

Neuroconstructivism is a theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations in the developing brain. Cognitive development is explained as emerging from the experience-dependent development of neural structures supporting mental representations. Neural development occurs in the context of multiple interacting constraints acting on different levels, from the individual cell to the external environment of the developing child. Cognitive development can thus be understood as a trajectory originating from the constraints on the underlying neural structures. This perspective offers an integrated view of normal and abnormal development as well as of development and adult processing, and it stands apart from traditional cognitive approaches in taking seriously the constraints on cognition inherent to the substrate that delivers it.

In the past few years connectionist models have greatly contributed to formulating theories of cognitive development. Some of these models follow the approach of developmental cognitive neuroscience in exploring interactions between brain development and cognitive development by integrating structural change into learning. We describe two classes of these models. The first focuses on experience-dependent structural elaboration within a brain region by adding or deleting units and connections during learning. The second models the gradual integration of different brain areas based on combinations of experience-dependent and maturational factors. These models provide new theories of the mechanisms of cognitive change in various domains and they offer an integrated framework to study normal and abnormal development, and normal and impaired adult processing.

Existing concepts can be a major barrier to learning new counterintuitive concepts that contradict pre-existing experience-based beliefs or misleading perceptual cues. When reasoning about counterintuitive concepts, inhibitory control is thought to enable the suppression of incorrect concepts. This study investigated the association between inhibitory control and counterintuitive science and maths reasoning in adolescents (N = 90, 11–15 years). Both response and semantic inhibition were associated with counterintuitive science and maths reasoning, when controlling for age, general cognitive ability, and performance in control science and maths trials. Better response inhibition was associated with longer reaction times in counterintuitive trials, while better semantic inhibition was associated with higher accuracy in counterintuitive trials. This novel finding suggests that different aspects of inhibitory control may offer unique contributions to counterintuitive reasoning during adolescence and provides further support for the hypothesis that inhibitory control plays a role in science and maths reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developmental research on flexible attentional control in young children has often focused on the role of attention in task-switching in a unimodal context. In real life, children must master the art of switching attention not only between task demands, but also between sensory modalities. Previous study has shown that young children can be efficient at switching between unimodal tasks when the situation allows, incurring no greater task-switching costs than adults. However, young children may still experience a greater demand to shift attention between modalities than older participants. To address this, we tested 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds and adults on a novel cross-modal task-switching paradigm involving multisensory detection tasks. While we found age differences in absolute reaction time and accuracy, young children and adults both exhibited strikingly similar effects in task-switching, modality-shifting, and the interaction between them. Young children did not exhibit a greater attentional bottleneck on either the task level, or on the modality level; thus, the evidence suggests that young children engaged in similar cognitive operations in the current cross-modal tasks to adult participants. It appears that cognitive operations in multisensory task configuration are relatively mature between 4 and 6 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with relatively strong language abilities despite mild to moderate intellectual disability, particularly when language is indexed by vocabulary. Aims: The aim of the study was twofold: (1) to investigate whether reported lexical anomalies in WS can be explained with reference to anomalous semantic development; and (2) to assess whether receptive vocabulary skills in WS, a relative strength, are underpinned by commensurate semantic knowledge. Methods & Procedures: The development of lexical-semantic knowledge was investigated in 45 typically developing individuals (chronological age range = 5-10 years, mental age range = 5-13 years) and 15 individuals with WS (chronological age range = 12-50 years, mental age range = 4-17 years) by means of (1) a categorization task and (2) a definitions task, which was expected to make additional metacognitive demands. Outcomes & Results: At younger ages, the performance level of typically developing individuals and individuals with WS did not differ on the definitions task. However, the WS group's ability to define words fell away from the level predicted by the typically developing group at older ages, as more sophisticated definitions were expected. The results of the categorization task indicated that individuals with WS had less lexical-semantic knowledge than expected given their level of receptive vocabulary, although from this lower level the knowledge then developed at a similar rate to that found in typical development. Conclusions & Implications: It is concluded, first, that conventional vocabulary measures may overestimate lexical-semantic knowledge in WS; and, second, concerns about the metacognitive demands of the definitions task when used with atypical populations may be well founded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, we reiterate the importance of development (both ontogenetic and phylogenetic) in the understanding of a complex cognitive skill — analogical reasoning. Four key questions structure the response: Does relational priming exist, and is it sufficient for analogy? What do we mean by relations as transformations? Could all or any relations be represented as transformations? And what about the challenge of more complex analogies? In addressing these questions we bring together a number of supportive commentaries, strengthening our emergentist case for analogy (in particular with insights from comparative psychology), and review new supportive evidence. We also rebut those commentaries that ignore development at their peril. Along the way, we revisit the main assumptions underlying the analogy as relational priming (ARP) account of analogy, clarifying and elaborating as necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response, we consider four main issues arising from the commentaries to the target article. These include further details of the theory of interactive specialization, the relationship between neuroconstructivism and selectionism, the implications of neuroconstructivism for the notion of representation, and the role of genetics in theories of development. We conclude by stressing the importance of multidisciplinary approaches in the future study of cognitive development and by identifying the directions in which neuroconstructivism can expand in the Twenty-first Century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of experiments we tested 4- and 8-month-olds' ability to represent the spatial layout of an object across changes in its orientation with respect to egocentric spatial coordinates. A fixed-trial familiarization procedure based on visual habituation behaviour shows that both age groups are able to discriminate between different object-centred spatial configurations. Furthermore, both age groups demonstrate the ability to make discriminations of object-centred spatial coordinates that require simultaneous reference to at least two spatial axes of the object. We discuss these findings in relation to theories of the early development of object recognition and spatial reference skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript surveys computational modeling efforts by researchers in developmental psychology. Developmental psychology is ready to blossom into a modern science that focuses on causal mechanistic explanations of development rather than just describing and classifying behaviors. Computational modeling is the key to this process. However, to be effective, models must not only mimic observed data. They must also be transparent, grounded, and plausible to be accepted by the developmental psychology community. Connectionist model provides one such example. Many developmental features of typical and atypical perception, cognition, and language have been modeled using connectionist methods. Successful models are closely tied to the details of existing empirical studies and make concrete testable predictions. The success of such a project relies on the close collaboration of computational scientists with empirical psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habituation and related procedures are the primary behavioral tools used to assess perceptual and cognitive competence in early infancy. This article introduces a neurally constrained computational model of infant habituation. The model combines the two leading process theories of infant habituation into a single functional system that is grounded in functional brain circuitry. The HAB model (for Habituation, Autoassociation, and Brain) proposes that habituation behaviors emerge from the opponent, complementary processes of hippocampal selective inhibition and cortical long-term potentiation. Simulations of a seminal experiment by Fantz [Visual experience in infants: Decreased attention familiar patterns relative to novel ones. Science, 146, 668–670, 1964] are reported. The ability of the model to capture the fine detail of infant data (especially age-related changes in performance) underlines the useful contribution of neurocomputational models to our understanding of behavior in general, and of early cognition in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review pursues the idea that a dual visual system approach is fruitful for interpreting work on infant cognition. We provide examples from the visual perception and cognition literature demonstrating that the potential graspability of stimuli typically used in infant studies influence how these stimuli are processed by the infant brain. Specifically, we argue that small, local, familiar and moving stimuli are more likely to be processed by the dorsal (how or action) stream of visual processing. In contrast, larger, stationary objects are likely to be processed by the ventral (what or perception) stream. This analysis clarifies apparently conflicting results in the literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Suggests that connectionist models aiming to reveal the mechanisms of atypical cognitive development must also be models of normal development and follow a developmental trajectory that matches empirical data. Review of a study published in the December 2002 issue of the journal "Behavioral and Brain Science"; Aspect of development that constructivist models can capture; Discussion on Williams syndrome in children.

Argues that it is essential for theories of adult visual cognition to take constraints from development. Problems with a claim on dual route visual processing; Role of the dual route visual processing paradigm in the study of infant perceptual and cognitive development; Studies measuring Evoked Response Potentials.

Focuses on the use of a field theory model for providing a truly scientific account of development. Tools for exploring how changes to the mechanistic theories affect the emergence of behavior; Contribution of computational models to explicit common platform; Possible source of constraints on the model regarding infant cognition.

Opinion. Scrutinizes the article on the constructivist view on the relationship between cognitive development and neurobiology. Absence of relevant element in the constructivist manifesto; Function of computer models of child development; Description of generative connectionist algorithms.

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk extraction. The mechanism relies on the recognition of previously encountered subsequences (chunks) in the input rather than on the prediction of upcoming items in the input sequence. A connectionist autoassociator model of ICR, truncated recursive autoassociative chunk extractor (TRACX), is presented in which chunks are extracted by means of truncated recursion. The performance and robustness of the model is demonstrated in a series of 9 simulations of empirical data, covering a wide range of phenomena from the infant statistical learning and adult implicit learning literatures, as well as 2 simulations demonstrating the model's ability to generalize to new input and to develop internal representations whose structure reflects that of the items in the input sequence. TRACX outperforms PARSER (Perruchet & Vintner, 1998) and the simple recurrent network (SRN, Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991) in matching human sequence segmentation on existing data. A new study is presented exploring 8-month-olds' use of backward transitional probabilities to segment auditory sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]