…questions that occupied Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss scientist who became famous for his theories about the development of intelligence in children. Of Mollusks and Men Piaget began his intellectual career early. In 1907, at age ten, he wrote to the director of the natural history museum in his hometown of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, asking for permission to visit the collection after hours. The director, Paul Godet, responded positively…
…and thus develop a motor-driven survival skill that they would normally master with ease during its preferred developmental period may not recover from the deprivation. A good example is the tragic case of Genie, who was 13 when discovered hidden naked in a closet. Her mentally disturbed parents had almost totally deprived her of normal language and motor development. Competent therapists who then tried to undo the damage were only mar…
…tasks, functional magnetic resonance imaging scans measured blood-flow changes in specific brain regions. These data provided an indirect index of rises and falls in brain-cell activity. In one study, published in the Feb. 10 Nature, the researchers evaluated 13 healthy adults, ages 21 to 35, in a sleep laboratory. Each participant tried to memorize short lists of words on the afternoon following a full night’s sleep and then after ab…
…iversity of Colorado Health Sciences Center and Robin Corley at the University of Colorado, have delved into the mysteries of how young children come about language; their research has produced some interesting clues. In a 1997 study to examine cognitive development during the second year, they looked at 408 pairs of identical and same-sex fraternal toddlers, aged 14, 20, and 24 months. Using the Bayley Mental Development Index, the resear…
…ical information, and then responded with a couple good links, and with additional explanations of several things I thought she might not know. It took me less than 30 minutes to help my distraught friend. Let’s go back 10 years and think about what I would have had to do then. It would probably involve spending several hours in a trip to the university library, copying or duplicating relevant information, and typing it into an email reply…
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