Patterns Of Cognitive Development Research Articles

Interspecific differences in developmental mode determine early cognitive abilities in teleost fish

Most studies on developmental variation in cognition have suggested that individuals are born with reduced or absent cognitive abilities, and thereafter, cognitive performance increases with age during early development. However, these studies have been mainly performed in altricial species, such as humans, in which offspring are extremely immature at birth. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that species with other developmental modes might show different patterns of cognitive development. To this end, we analysed inhibitory control performance in two teleost species with different developmental modes, the zebrafish Danio rerio and the guppy Poecilia reticulata, exploiting a simple paradigm based on spontaneous behaviour and therefore applicable to subjects of different ages. Zebrafish hatch as larvae 3 days after fertilisation, and have an immature nervous system, a situation that mirrors extreme altriciality. We found that at the early stages of development, zebrafish displayed no evidence of inhibitory control, which only begun to emerge after one month of life. Conversely, guppies, which are born after approximately one month of gestation as fully developed and independent individuals, solved the inhibitory control task since their first days of life, although performance increased with sexual maturation. Our study suggests that the typical progression described during early ontogeny in humans and other species might not be the only developmental trend for animals’ cognition and that a species’ developmental mode might determine variation in cognition across subjects of different age.

Do Chinese- and English-speaking preschoolers think differently about language?

Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to identify, reflect upon, and manipulate linguistic units. It plays a critical role in reading development. The present study investigated Chinese- and English-speaking preschoolers’ metalinguistic awareness development and the role of cognitive and linguistic abilities in its development. Forty-two Chinese-speaking and 36 English-speaking monolingual children completed a series of metalinguistic awareness, false belief, inhibitory control, and receptive vocabulary tasks. The results revealed distinct pathways for the two language groups. English speakers had a more advanced level of rhyme awareness. Chinese speakers developed homonym understanding faster during the preschool years. Inhibitory control was more important for Chinese speakers to develop synonym and homonym understanding, whereas receptive vocabulary was crucial for English speakers to develop rhyme awareness. These differences may be attributable to the characteristics of the Chinese and English languages, as well as the patterns of cognitive development in the two populations.

Graph theory and cognition: A complementary avenue for examining neuropsychological status in epilepsy.

The recent revision of the classification of the epilepsies released by the ILAE Commission on Classification and Terminology (2005-2009) has been a major development in the field. Papers in this section of the special issue explore the relevance of other techniques to examine, categorize, and classify cognitive and behavioral comorbidities in epilepsy. In this review, we investigate the applicability of graph theory to understand the impact of epilepsy on cognition compared with controls and, then, the patterns of cognitive development in normally developing children which would set the stage for prospective comparisons of children with epilepsy and controls. The overall goal is to examine the potential utility of this analytic tool and approach to conceptualize the cognitive comorbidities in epilepsy. Given that the major cognitive domains representing cognitive function are interdependent, the associations between neuropsychological abilities underlying these domains can be referred to as a cognitive network. Therefore, the architecture of this cognitive network can be quantified and assessed using graph theory methods, rendering a novel approach to the characterization of cognitive status. We first provide fundamental information about graph theory procedures, followed by application of these techniques to cross-sectional analysis of neuropsychological data in children with epilepsy compared with that of controls, concluding with prospective analysis of neuropsychological development in younger and older healthy controls. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled "The new approach to classification: Rethinking cognition and behavior in epilepsy".

Comparative Developmental Psychology: How is Human Cognitive Development Unique?

The fields of developmental and comparative psychology both seek to illuminate the roots of adult cognitive systems. Developmental studies target the emergence of adult cognitive systems over ontogenetic time, whereas comparative studies investigate the origins of human cognition in our evolutionary history. Despite the long tradition of research in both of these areas, little work has examined the intersection of the two: the study of cognitive development in a comparative perspective. In the current article, we review recent work using this comparative developmental approach to study non-human primate cognition. We argue that comparative data on the pace and pattern of cognitive development across species can address major theoretical questions in both psychology and biology. In particular, such integrative research will allow stronger biological inferences about the function of developmental change, and will be critical in addressing how humans come to acquire species-unique cognitive abilities.

Intellectual development of 15- to 16-year-old boys and girls: Psychophysiological structure

The structure of intelligence in senior adolescents has been studied. The analysis of intelligence in adolescents of both sexes has shown that there are no distinct differences in the structure of intellectual development between boys and girls aged 15–16 years. Significantly better results have been obtained only for the memory development of girls. This suggests that the pattern of cognitive development does not depend on the sex at the last stages of puberty. Significant variation of individual intellectual characteristics confirms a high variability of the psychophysiological structure of intelligence in adolescents at this ontogenetic stage.

Research on the development of academic skills: introduction to the special issue on early literacy and early numeracy.

Welcome to the special issue on early literacy and early numeracy. We have a diverse collection of articles, elicited by asking researchers to submit short succinct manuscripts describing their recent research in one of these areas. The breadth of submissions received was surprising. The term early elicited manuscripts involving children as young as three and as old as ten, and the topics ranged from the relation between home literacy activities and reading acquisition to children's ability to estimate the sums of three-digit numbers. Despite the breadth of topics, however, there are several themes that tie these papers together. The first theme is that novice readers or calculators often use surprisingly sophisticated conceptual knowledge in their cognitive activities. In the present issue, Klein and Bisanz outline the role of early conceptual abilities in the addition performance of 4-year-olds. Senechal shows that 7-year-olds make use of morphological information to spell words. Bialystok and Codd explore the abilities of 3- to 7-year-olds in representing quantities. Lemaire, Lecacheur, and Farioli examine how 10-year-olds use sophisticated strategies to solve estimation problems. Across the seven papers in this issue, children showed an impressive variety of conceptual abilities, as well as some interesting limitations. A second theme that arises from several papers in this issue is the important role for experiential factors in cognitive development. Evans, Shaw, and Bell describe the relations between parent teaching activities and reading acquisition. Miller, Major, Shu, and Zhang show how language influences children's emerging numerical competencies. Such research suggests that closer attention to the wider community of learning that children experience will provide important insights into patterns of cognitive development. A third theme that arose serendipitously from our selection of researchers was that four of the seven papers in this special issue include or are based solely on the performance of children who speak a language other than English (i.e., Lemaire et al.; Miller et al.; Senechal; SprengerCharolles, Cole, Lacert, & Serniclaes). Research on cognitive development should be greatly enhanced by looking beyond an Anglo-centric perspective. A fourth theme of these papers, diversity in methodology, may represent somewhat of a departure from a typical collection of papers in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. The papers in this special issue represent a wide diversity of methods, running the gamut from correlational designs (Evans et al.) and reading-level and age-level matching designs (Sprenger-Charolles et al.) to methods that more closely resemble traditional experimental paradigms (e.g., Klein & Bisanz; Lemaire et al.; Senechal). We feel that all of these methods have a place in a broad understanding of cognitive development. Three- and four-year-olds are seldom amenable to the multi-trial, data-intensive approach that characterizes research on adult cognitive processes. Often, research on cognitive processes in children begins with observational studies, and progresses (slowly!) to focused experimental work. Children lead busy lives, and as researchers, we are limited in the amount of behaviour that we are able to extract from them. It should be clear from this set of papers that a diversity of methods does not mean a lowering of the standards for scientific research. Furthermore, each paper in this special issue presents a unique perspective, topic, or methodology, adding to the array of tools that can be accessed to advance research in this area. In the next two sections, I will briefly discuss how each of the papers contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in the areas of either early literacy or early numeracy. DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY LITERACY Three of the papers in this issue address questions in the area of early literacy (Evans et al. …

Sensorimotor intelligence in severely mentally handicapped children.

The pattern of cognitive development in severely mentally handicapped children was assessed with the Uzgiris-Hunt (1975) Scales of Infant Psychological Development, which measure pre-verbal sensorimotor intelligence. The normative data on which Uzgiris & Hunt constructed the Scales were used for the comparison. The results indicated considerable deficits in the handicapped children, particularly in imitation.

Individual Piagetian Epistemological Development of Children from Ages 6 to 11

Abstract This long-term study of children from ages 6 to 11 was undertaken to support the patterns of cognitive development inferred from Piaget's work and its short-term statistical replications. Several Piagetian tasks were used individually with 48 first graders, some of the same and new tasks with 43 of the same children as third graders, and two new tasks with 38 of the same children as fifth graders. Pearson product-moment coefficients indicated that uses of the clinical tasks in the study agreed significantly with those in the literature. In 33 individual line graphs, the average age (as indicated in the literature) for the most difficult task performed by a child at each level was compared with the actual age for the child's performance. Although individual aberrations in rates and patterns of cognitive development were observed, the graphic data supported the main hypothesis of the study.

Reviews: Mathematics in the Vernacular

In Cross-Cultural Studies in Cognition and Mathematics David Laney describes the ambitious Indigenous Mathematics Project carried out in Papua New Guinea (P.N.G.) with the full support of the P.N.G. Department of Education and set up to examine the relationship between children's cultural background and their pattern of cognitive development, particularly with respect to category formation. Whether the acquisition of school arithmetic was influenced by these factors was also investigated, though less comprehensively. The book seems a ready example of Brislin's (1983) contention that “in the last four to five years cross-cultural studies have been recognized as central to theory development by large numbers of psychologists” (p. 364).

Early Patterns of Cognitive Development

Early Patterns of Cognitive Development

Patterns of psycholinguistic development in the severely mentally retarded: a hypothesis.

Abstract We hypothesize that the loss of psycholinguistic skills in some cases of severe mental retardation caused by prenatal disruption closely approximates ontogenetic patterns of language acquisition and phylogenetic patterns of cognitive development. This hypothesis was tested on 131 trainable mental retardates divided into four etiological classes. The results support the hypothesis and show that certain patterns of loss occur only in mental retardation resulting from prenatal disruption and characterized by postnatal developmental delay and do not occur in postnatal environmentally caused retardation.

Twins: Patterns of cognitive development as measured on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence.

Cognitive patterning and development was appraised for 142 pairs of twins at 4, 5, and 6 years of age, based on their test scores on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. Compared with the singleton norms, the twins showed an initial lag at age 4, with Verbal IQ being somewhat more depressed than Performance IQ, By age 6, however, the twins had fully recovered their deficit on both scales and reached parity with singletons. Monozygotic twins displayed relatively high withinpair correlations for Verbal IQ and Performance IQ, and even higher correlations for Full Scale IQ. Dizygotic twins displayed moderate within-pair correlations for the IQ scores, and most were significantly lower than the monozygotic correlations. Further analysis showed that monozygotic twins were also significantly more concordant for the differences between Verbal IQ and Performance IQ, and for the patterning of the subtest scores. Measures of family socioeconomic status and parental education correlated .2S-.32 with the twins' IQ at age 6. The results led to the inference that within a broad range of home environments, the genetic blueprint made a substantial contribution to cognitive patterning and development. Mental development in the preschool years is characterized by the rapid expansion of cognitive abilities which gradually develop into the attribute called intelligence. While infancy is largely dominated by sensorimotor processes, there appears to be a significant transition after age 2 years to the more