Publications by authors named "Witherington D"

Disciplines like evolutionary developmental psychology admirably focus on trying to rehabilitate narrow evolutionary psychology (NEP) from within, by adding a developmental focus to NEP's tenets of adaptationism and computationalism. We argue, however, that these tenets are fundamentally incompatible with taking psychology and its development seriously, and that the kinds of modifications introduced by evolutionary developmental psychologists do not go deep enough to qualitatively change the nondevelopmental outlook of NEP. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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Which evolutionary theory can best benefit psychological theory, research, and application? The most well-known school of evolutionary psychology has a narrow conceptual perspective (a.k.a.

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Given limitations in the integrative scope of past research, basic questions about the organization and development of preschoolers' living kinds concept remain open to debate. This study was designed to address past limitations through use of a longitudinal design, extensive stimulus set, and alternate indices of understanding. Thirty-five English-speaking 3-year-olds from middle-class families in Albuquerque, NM participated in four testing sessions over 1 year.

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Although participation in sports that emphasize aestheticism, such as women's gymnastics, are associated with higher rates of eating pathology, little is known about the risk and protective factors involved in this process. We established and tested a model proposing that body surveillance and body shame are processes by which pubertal development and training may uniquely contribute to pathological eating by sampling 100 competitive female gymnasts via questionnaires. We further tested whether self-esteem moderated several model relationships.

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The psychological revolution that follows the onset of independent locomotion in the latter half of the infant's first year provides one of the best illustrations of the intimate connection between action and psychological processes. In this paper, we document some of the dramatic changes in perception-action coupling, spatial cognition, memory, and social and emotional development that follow the acquisition of independent locomotion. We highlight the range of converging research operations that have been used to examine the relation between locomotor experience and psychological development, and we describe recent attempts to uncover the processes that underlie this relation.

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Relational, systems-oriented approaches are strongly positioned to advance theory and research in developmental science and to cement a process orientation to development at all levels of organization--from the biological to the psychological and sociocultural--despite continued prominence in the field of biologically reductionist explanatory accounts. However, the inclusive, explanatorily pluralistic ontological framework involved in adopting a relational perspective on developing systems is not always fully appreciated, explicitly articulated or even followed by devotees of the perspective. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of holistically couching interlevel relations--those that obtain vertically between levels of organization, such as between the biological and psychological levels--in terms of wholes and parts and of recognizing the different modes of causal explanation that obtain depending on whether the relations move from parts-to-whole or whole-to-parts.

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Human infants with little or no crawling experience surprisingly show no wariness of heights, but such wariness becomes exceptionally strong over the life span. Neither depth perception nor falling experiences explain this extraordinary developmental shift; however, something about locomotor experience does. The crucial component of locomotor experience in this emotional change is developments in visual proprioception-the optically based perception of self-movement.

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This study investigated preschoolers' living kinds conceptualization by employing an extensive stimulus set and alternate indices of understanding. Thirty-four 3- to 5-year-olds and 36 adult undergraduates completed 3 testing phases involving 4 object classes: plants, animals, mobile, and immobile artifacts. The phases involved inquiries participants generated, what biological properties they attributed and their assignment of "alive" to the 4 classes.

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Article Synopsis
  • The commentary supports J. Kagan's (2008) assertion that many findings in early perceptual, cognitive, and social abilities are unclear and calls for more comprehensive research methods to clarify these results.
  • It emphasizes the importance of studying early competencies within a longitudinal framework to track development over time and understand the potential for regression in skills.
  • Additionally, the commentary highlights the need to assess the consistency of competencies across different contexts to avoid over-interpretation of findings.
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Two studies investigated the role of locomotor experience on visual proprioception in 8-month-old infants. Visual proprioception refers to the sense of self-motion induced in a static person by patterns of optic flow. A moving room apparatus permitted displacement of an entire enclosure (except for the floor) or the side walls and ceiling.

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In recent years, both functionalist and dynamic systems approaches have assumed increasing prominence in the study of emotion and its development, but the similarities and differences between these perspectives remain largely unexplored and open to more systematic examination. In this article, the authors argue that both approaches share a systems view of emotion and regard emotion in relational, process terms. However, each approach adopts a distinct level of analysis and distinct types of explanation for emotion and its development.

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Human infants show a peak in postural compensation to optic flow at approximately nine months of age. The current experiment tested whether the magnitude of visual-postural coupling in 9-month-olds increases when terrestrial optic flow is added to a moving room. A secondary objective was to explore whether locomotor experience plays any role in enhancing responsiveness to the additional terrestrial information.

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Work with infants on the "visual cliff" links avoidance of drop-offs to experience with self-produced locomotion. Adolph's (2002) research on infants' perception of slope and gap traversability suggests that learning to avoid falling down is highly specific to the postural context in which it occurs. Infants, for example, who have learned to avoid crossing risky slopes while crawling must learn anew such avoidance when they start walking.

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By 7 months, infants, when reaching for an object, visually guide their grasp by preorienting their hands to match the object's orientation. Evidence at earlier ages, however, for prospective grasp control via anticipatory hand orientation is mixed. This study examined longitudinally the development of anticipatory hand orientation in 15 infants, seen every 3 weeks between 5 and 7.

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An important issue for understanding early cognition is why very young children's real-world representations do not get confused by pretense events. One possible source of information for children is the pretender's behaviors. Pretender behaviors may vary systematically across real and pretend scenarios, perhaps signaling to toddlers to interpret certain events as not real.

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The possible role of motor development on psychological function is once again a topic of great theoretical and practical importance. The revival of this issue has stemmed from a different approach to the topic, away from Gesell's interest in the long-term prediction of psychological functions from early motoric assessments, toward an attempt to understand how the acquisition of motor skills orchestrates psychological changes. This paper describes how the acquisition of one motor skill, prone locomotion, has been linked to developmental changes in an infant's ability to regulate posture based on information available in patterns of optic flow.

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The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self-produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self-motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies.

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The paper describes five cases of atrial fibrillation detected after racing. In four of them, the arrhythmia disappeared spontaneously within 24 h and they were regarded as paroxysmal in type. In the fifth case, which won its race, the arrhythmia persisted for at least 45 h after racing.

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The difficulties that arise in filling out marking certificates for thoroughbreds are described. The description given on the certificate has to be both written and graphic. A general guide to whorl location is given.

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