Interpretations: Form Clues: Grouping and Closure
To bring order and form to basic sensations, our minds follow certain rules for grouping stimuli-by proximity, by similarity, and by continuity. Even young children show an awareness of these rules of form. They know, for example, that two objects c...
The Growing Years: Brain Development in Infancy
From infancy on, the brain and mind, the neural hardware and cognitive software of an infant develop together. At birth the limbic areas are quite immature, and the cortex is almost entirely underdeveloped. The neurons are there, but the connections...
The Growing Years: Developing a Sense of Self
By the end of childhood, most children have developed a sense of themselves as individuals, unique and apart from others they know and see. Although the general consensus of researchers is that this sense does not emerge before the age of two, Karen...
The Growing Years: Do Babies Have a Sense of Numbers?
Karen Wynn and a team of researchers at the Yale Infant Cognition Laboratory are conducting experiments related to young babies and their ability to grasp number and mathematics concepts. Using "looking time" as a measure of a baby's expectations, r...
Thinking and Language: Child's Remarkable Ability to Acquire Language, A
Young children gain access to language in well-documented stages, from cooing and babbling to an explosion of words at about 18 months. B. F. Skinner thought that language acquisition relied on operant conditioning and reinforcement, whereas Noam Ch...