The kleineWeltentdecker App - A smartphone-based developmental diary.

Today, a vast number of tools exist to measure development in early childhood in a variety of domains such as cognition, language, or motor, cognition. These tools vary in different aspects. Either children are examined by a trained experimenter, or caregivers fill out questionnaires.

Compatibility Effects in Young Children's Tool Use: Learning and Transfer.

An inherent component of tool-use actions is the transformation of the user's operating movement into the desired effect. In this study, the relevance of this transformation for young children's learning of tool-use actions was investigated. Sixty-four children at the age of 27-30 months learned to use levers which either simply extended (compatible transformation) or reversed (incompatible transformation) their operating movements.

Turning the tide: A plea for cognitively lean interpretations of infant behaviour.

Keven & Akins (K&A) revisit the controversial subject of neonatal imitation through analysing the physiological foundations of neonatal spontaneous behaviour. Consequently, they regard imitative capacities in neonates as unlikely. We welcome this approach as an overdue encouragement to refuse cognitively rich interpretations as far as cognitively lean interpretations are conceivable, and apply this rationale to other phenomena in early childhood development.

Rethinking 'rational imitation' in 14-month-old infants: a perceptual distraction approach.

In their widely noticed study, Gergely, Bekkering, and Király (2002) showed that 14-month-old infants imitated an unusual action only if the model freely chose to perform this action and not if the choice of the action could be ascribed to external constraints. They attributed this kind of selective imitation to the infants' capacity of understanding the principle of rational action. In the current paper, we present evidence that a simpler approach of perceptual distraction may be more appropriate to explain their results.

On the spatial interaction of visual working memory and attention: evidence for a global effect from memory-guided saccades.

Recent work indicates that covert visual attention and eye movements on the one hand, and covert visual attention and visual working memory on the other hand are closely interrelated. Two experiments address the question whether all three processes draw on the same spatial representations. Participants had to memorize a target location for a subsequent memory-guided saccade.

Embodied rules in tool use: a tool-switching study.

In tool use, a transformation rule defines the relation between an operating movement and its distal effect. This rule is determined by the tool structure and requires no explicit definition. The present study investigates how humans represent and apply compatible and incompatible transformation rules in tool use.