Cognitive and social factors in the development of infants with Down syndrome.

Infants and young children with Down syndrome can be engaging and affectionate. It seems that in the early months of life their personal relations may be relatively 'spared' the effects of limitations in their capacities for information-processing. Yet how far is this the case as development proceeds? In this paper we discuss some ways in which social and cognitive development interact and mutually influence one another over the first year or so of life, and present preliminary findings from a longitudinal study of infants with and without Down syndrome.

Reassessing emotion recognition performance in people with mental retardation: a review.

Many investigators have reported that people with mental retardation have problems on emotion-recognition tasks. The evidence for the specificity of these performance deficits is reviewed, detailed consideration of the information-processing demands of different types of emotion-recognition tasks provided, and the conclusion made that evidence from identification tasks does not support the specificity hypothesis. It is suggested that deficits on other types of tasks may be due to IQ-related deficits in memory and attention, in imagination, and in dealing with static or ambiguous stimuli.