The meaning of boredom : Properly managing childhood boredom could lead to more fulfilling lives.

Boredom is a unique human emotion. Understanding its causes and consequences and how people learn to cope with it to develop new ideas and inspiration could help to alleviate its negative effects. [Image: see text]

Corrigendum: The relationship between children's scale error production and play patterns including pretend play.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.

Children's scale errors and object processing: Early evidence for cross-cultural differences.

Scale errors are observed when young children make mistakes by attempting to put their bodies into miniature versions of everyday objects. Such errors have been argued to arise from children's insufficient integration of size into their object representations. The current study investigated whether Japanese and UK children's (18-24 months old, N = 80) visual exploration in a categorization task related to their scale error production.

Segmentation of Rhythmic Units in Word Speech by Japanese Infants and Toddlers.

When infants and toddlers are confronted with sequences of sounds, they are required to segment the sounds into meaningful units to achieve sufficient understanding. Rhythm has been regarded as a crucial cue for segmentation of speech sounds. Although previous intermodal methods indicated that infants and toddlers could detect differences in speech sounds based on stress-timed and syllable-timed units, these methods could not clearly indicate how infants and toddlers perform sound segmentation.

The Relationship Between Children's Scale Error Production and Play Patterns Including Pretend Play.

Children of about 2 years of age occasionally make scale errors, e.g., they may attempt to fit their body into extremely small objects.

Developmental Changes in Memory-Related Linguistic Skills and Their Relationship to Episodic Recall in Children.

This longitudinal study of nine children examined two issues concerning infantile amnesia: the time at which memories for events experienced before the age of 3-4 years disappear from consciousness and whether this timing of memory loss is related to the development of specific aspects of episodic and autobiographical memory. This study followed children from infancy to early childhood and examined the central role of three verbal-cognitive milestones related to autobiographical memory: the age at which children begin to report autobiographical memories using the past tense (Milestone 1); the age at which they begin to verbally acknowledge past events (Milestone 2); and the age at which they begin to spontaneously use memory-related verbs (Milestone 3). As expected, memories of events that occurred before 3-4 years of age were affected by infantile amnesia.

Developmental changes in consistency of preferential feeling for peers and objects around age four.

When do young children come to have an individual mental image of each peer? Forming a stable impression of each person requires maturation of at least two cognitive abilities, inferring the other's mind and episodic memory. According to past studies, the critical period for both these abilities is around age four. Thus, it was hypothesized that the child begins to form a consistent mental image of each peer at or after age four.