Age 5 cognitive development in England

Children’s development in the early years has been shown to be related to their success in later life in a range of areas including education, employment and crime. Determining why some children do better than others in the early years is a key issue for policy and is crucial in attempts to reduce inequalities. This research examines differences in early child development by examining the factors associated with the cognitive ability of children up to age 5 using cognitive assessments administered as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and teacher reports of child ability. The results show that younger children, those with low birth weight, lower parental education, lower income and living in social housing is related both to lower achievement, on average. and the probability of being at the bottom of the distribution of cognitive scores at age 5

Music\u27s Influence on Cognitive Development

Many people have disputed that music affect\u27s brain development. Often, people will challenge the idea that music can lead to an enhancement of higher brain functioning. However, it has been demonstrated, through varied use of music that people benefit from music\u27s impact on both hemispheres of the brain, which make learning easier. Through the collection of multiple resources, my research study will focus on the various benefits of music with regard to cognitive development. The action research study will be based on music integration at the elementary level and its impact on student learning and motivation. I will survey various classroom teachers to understand the involvement of music in their curriculum and music services offered to students with special needs. The goal of this research study is to investigate the relationship between music and brain growth with regard to student learning and motivation within the classroom. I hope to find a strong connection between engaging children with music at various levels and development. Also, I am hoping to find an increase in student motivation when music is integrated within the curriculum. This topic was chosen because of its impact on my childhood. I grew up with music in my home and in various classroom settings. I felt that music helped me to remember things when they were put to music. In first grade my teacher would play her guitar and we would sing songs. To this day I still remember Down by the Bay... a song about creating rhymes. I feel that this had an influence on my achievement because it always kept me thinking and learning new things keeps my brain exercised

Perceptual Abstraction for Robotic Cognitive Development

We are concerned with the design of a developmental robot that learns from scratch simple models about itself and its surroundings. A particular attention is given to perceptual abstraction from high-dimensional sensors

Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development

This study investigates the relationship between parental employment and child cognitive development using data from multiple years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life is predicted to have a small negative effect on the verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a substantial detrimental impact on the reading and math achievement of 5 and 6 year olds. Working during the second and third years appears to have less favorable or more deleterious consequences when the mother is also employed in the first year. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal job-holding and there is some indication that early employment may be particularly costly for children in traditional' two-parent families. Finally, the data suggest that paternal and maternal employment have qualitatively similar effects, hinting at the importance of time investments by fathers. The overall conclusion is that previous research may have provided an overly optimistic assessment of the effects of parental employment on child cognitive development.

An Exploration of the Dynamic Relationship between Health and Cognitive Development in Adolescence

This paper is an empirical exploration of the dynamic relationship between health and cognitive development in a longitudinal data set compiled from two nationally representative cross-sections of children. Our results indicate that there is feedback both from health to cognitive development and from cognitive development to health, but the latter of these relationships is stronger. They also indicate that estimates of family background effects taken from the dynamic model -- which can be assumed to be less influenced by genetic factors are smaller than their cross-sectional counterparts, but some still remain statistically significant. The first finding calls attention to the existence of a continuing inter-action between health and cognitive development over the life cycle. The second finding suggests that nurture "matters" in cognitive development and health outcomes.

Perception, cognitive development and humour in the child

Like beauty, humour is in the eye of the beholder, having no objective existence, being purely a product of the act of perception) In other words, humour results not from the concrete object which impinges physically upon the organism, but from the complex process which organizes and places the sensory-data within a frame of reference, thus bestowing meaning on it. A "humour stimulus" (e.g. a "joke") - like any other stimulus - is intrinsically meaningless, and only acquires meaning after the perceptual process has successfully managed to decipher a pattern in the stimulus which can be matched with pre-existing schemata in the mind.peer-reviewe

Modelling individual variability in cognitive development

Investigating variability in reasoning tasks can provide insights into key issues in the study of cognitive development. These include the mechanisms that underlie developmental transitions, and the distinction between individual differences and developmental disorders. We explored the mechanistic basis of variability in two connectionist models of cognitive development, a model of the Piagetian balance scale task (McClelland, 1989) and a model of the Piagetian conservation task (Shultz, 1998). For the balance scale task, we began with a simple feed-forward connectionist model and training patterns based on McClelland (1989). We investigated computational parameters, problem encodings, and training environments that contributed to variability in development, both across groups and within individuals. We report on the parameters that affect the complexity of reasoning and the nature of ‘rule’ transitions exhibited by networks learning to reason about balance scale problems. For the conservation task, we took the task structure and problem encoding of Shultz (1998) as our base model. We examined the computational parameters, problem encodings, and training environments that contributed to variability in development, in particular examining the parameters that affected the emergence of abstraction. We relate the findings to existing cognitive theories on the causes of individual differences in development

Children, Humanoid Robots and Caregivers

This paper presents developmental learning on a humanoid robot from human-robot interactions. We consider in particular teaching humanoids as children during the child's Separation and Individuation developmental phase (Mahler, 1979). Cognitive development during this phase is characterized both by the child's dependence on her mother for learning while becoming awareness of her own individuality, and by self-exploration of her physical surroundings. We propose a learning framework for a humanoid robot inspired on such cognitive development