Social learning in the digital age: Associations between technoference, mother-child attachment, and child social skills.

Technoference refers to incidents in which technology use interferes with interpersonal exchanges (e.g., conversations, playing).

An introduction to the Video Activity Coder: Free software for coding videorecorded behaviors.

The Video Activity Coder is a free, open-source computer program that can assist in coding behaviors in videorecorded datasets. Several programs already exist with this purpose; however, some of these are quite expensive, whereas some open-source, free alternatives have limitations. The Video Activity Coder allows a user to view recorded observations with the ability to play, pause, rewind, and fast-forward video clips easily.

Young Children and Adults' Sensitivity to Contexts for Social Conventions in Make-Believe Play.

The author focused on how young children understand the nature of social conventions relating to pretend play. Twenty 4-year-olds, fifteen 6-year-olds, and 20 adults (undergraduate students) listened to vignettes in which a new child in each vignette violated a convention used by other children while playing. Participants indicated whether the violations would be corrected and whether someone needed to teach the conventions to the new children.

Task constraints on preschool children's grip configurations during drawing.

Traditional accounts of motor development have described the development of grip configurations in terms of a global maturational change from immature to mature grips. We present data that demonstrate that the grip configurations of preschool-aged children are greatly influenced by task demands and are more variable than previous research has suggested. Grip configurations were most variable during free drawing.

Sociocultural contexts for the early development of semiotic production.

Children constantly encounter signs during cultural practices, although many theories do not fully acknowledge sociocultural aspects of semiotic development. The author examines research on cultural practices and contexts in which children learn to produce signs involving representational drawing and pretend play. This work is contrasted with more individualistic views of semiotic development that fail to adequately address sociocultural aspects of semiotic functioning to varying degrees.