Infants' recognition memory, forgetting, and savings.
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Attention↗
Biomedical subjects
E H Cornell
Publications and source records attributed to E H Cornell.
The effects of cue reliability on infants' manual search.
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Cues↗
Response versus place learning by human infants.
Two cross-setional studies examined how infants learn the location of visual events. In Experiment 1, infants of 4, 8, and 12 mo of age learned to turn one way to view a novel pattern. In a subsequent transfer task, they were rotated to face the opposite side of the room. The 4-mo-old infants tended to err by repeating their previously learned response, but within 16-20 trials their performance was comparable to the higher levels maintained by the older infants. These results suggest that young infants learn the location of the pattern primarily in terms of response cues, whereas older infants employ both response cues and place cues. Experiment 2 was designed to independently assess the use of response cues and place cues by infants of 4, 8, 12, and 16 mo of age. All infants were able to rapidly learn and remember the location of the novel pattern when they were given response cues. There was a gradual emergence of place-cue use associated with age. It is suggested that the decrease in infant egocentricity in such spatial localization tasks may in fact reflect an age-related increase in the variety of reliable cues responded to by infants.
Cues↗
Heritability in syntactic development: a critique of Munsinger and Douglass.
Munsinger and Douglass (Child Development, 1976, 47, 40-50) used the Assessment of Children's Language Comprehension and the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test as measures of syntactic ability to investigate the heritability factor in language acquisition. By comparing the concordance of scores of twins and siblings, they concluded that heritability was the important variable in test performance (h2 = .79) and that environmental influences were not much over, 10. In the present critique, weaknesses regarding test measures are pointed out, and the validity of these measures for the ages of the children used in the study is questioned. It is also emphasized that the question of environmental effects in normal circumstances remains unquantified, and research indicates that language intervention programs with deficient populations can be beneficial.
Age Factors↗
Intervention with premature human infants.
Stimulation has been given to young infants to prevent the development disabilities often associated with prematurity. A review of these experimental programs reveals a lack of knowledge as to the ecology of the premature infant. This is indicated in the assumption that premature infants are sensorily deprived and by the arbitrary differences in the nature of stimulation techniques. Despite various problems in methodological and outcome assessment, stimulated infants tend to perform at higher levels than control-group infants on measures of sensorimotor and development. It is suggested that future research should be directed toward specifying the environment and processing capacities of the premature infant, and that intervention studies should make use of the 4-group design proposed by Solomon and Lessac (1968).
Acoustic Stimulation↗
Identification of letterlike distortions by preschool children.
In two experiments preschool children chose one of two test forms that looked like previously exposed distortions of a letterlike-form. In Exp. I a distance metric was defined to measure the physical discrepancy between forms. It was found that the distance relationship between distortions and particular test forms did not designate the children's choice behavior. In Exp. II the children were able to choose previously exposed distortions when particular test forms contained novel features. The results are related to distinctive feature and prototype hypotheses to account for children's performance in recognizing forms.
Child↗
Infants' visual attention to pattern arrangement and orientation.
When 2 stimuli were presented side by side, 4-5-month-old infants looked longer at a visual target that differed from a previously exposed standard target. This reaction to the discrepant target indicated that infants could detect a change involving the arrangement of the constituent elements and the orientation of the standard pattern. When infants were given the opportunity to view paired targets that were both different from the previously exposed standard, there was no evidence that orientation was a less dimension than pattern arrangement. Instead, the infants' fixation behavior seemed to be a function of the relative discrepancy of the paired test stimuli from the previously exposed standard pattern.
Attention↗