The Child in Time

Do children think in words when planning how to solve a puzzle? A recent study looked at this issue by blocking children's use of speech to regulate their behavior. When children were not able to use words to plan, they did not do so well on the task. Read More

Autobiographical memories are sensitive to the context in which they were encoded. For people who learn a second language, the first language may be a strong cue to their earliest memories. Read More

Children and adults talk to themselves out loud, and they appear to gain cognitive benefits from doing so. Could tweeting achieve the same ends? Read More

Toddlers get involved in conversations about past events from an early age. These conversations about the past are initially quite heavily structured by caregivers, but children become more equal partners in them through the preschool years. The quality of these conversations seems to be important for children's later memory. Read More

In my last post, I asked whether some of the mysteries of thinking and inner speech can begin to be resolved when we consider how inner speech takes different forms. This time, I want to ask whether this view of inner speech can make sense of a puzzling and often very troubling experience: auditory verbal hallucinations. Read More

Children must develop a sense of free will, but how does this relate to their experience of their own actions, and how is it affected by their understanding of the collaborations in which they participate? Read More

The kind of mind-reading I'm interested in is not the telepathy sort beloved of sci-fi writers. It's the sort that involves treating an infant as an individual with a mind, and trying to work out what is going on for him or her. People differ in their willingness (or ability) to put themselves in children's shoes in this way, and these individual differences might have some important developmental consequences. Read More

Babies need to acquire knowledge about the limits of their own agency, and they do this by acting on the world. In this post, I suggest that this is a version of the problem that we all face when trying to establish our identity in a new context, such as a video game. Read More

Children become effective collaborators when they can represent the goals of their social partners and keep track of how those goals change. Humans are possibly unique in their willingness to share goals with others, and this motivation to collaborate appears early in childhood. New research shows early understanding of joint commitments to collaborate with others. Read More

Isaac, five, is doing some homework at the kitchen table. He has been given some letter shapes to trace, and he is concentrating hard, working on the flicks and flourishes that link one letter to another. He is relaxed and happy, and enjoying the chance to show off what he has been learning at school. Read More

In the last of this series of posts, I want to talk about some contemporary research in developmental psychology which offers clues to the experience of a small child. Last time, I mentioned how the Maurers had made good use of scientific knowledge about infant perception in their imagining of the world of the newborn. Read More

In my last post, I talked about my search through the world of fiction for clues about the experience of a small child. I suggested that we can probably learn more from scientists on this topic than we can from fiction-writers (although, as a novelist myself, I feel that I'm rather letting the side down by saying that). Read More