Children's Understanding of Logical Inconsistency

Five experiments involving 245 participants examined children's understanding of logical consistency. For instance, a character said that a man was both tall and very short. Only by 6 years of age did children show any understanding of logical inconsistency. This occurred despite: (1) good memory for the characters' claims; (2) the use of three different question forms including whether a person had made sense, said something silly, or whether both things a person said could be right; (3) the ability to identify other types of statements (e.g., factual inconsistencies) as not making sense; (4) the ability to compare and contrast the characters' claims in other ways; and (5) attempts to deepen children's processing of the claims by asking them to draw what each character said. Similar to false belief understanding, there was a monotonic relation between the number of older siblings a child had and logical consistency understanding on one of the tasks. It is argued that children may fail the different consistency tasks because of both logical factors (e.g., insufficient insight into logical necessity) and nonlogical factors tied to their social knowledge or insight into representation.     

The U.S. Government Printing Office's initiatives for the Federal Depository Library Program to set the stage for the 21st century

It is estimated that the majority of federal information is born digital. To that end, the U.S. Government Printing Office is transforming into a 21st century electronic information agency. As part of this effort, the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) has been investigating new options for the dissemination of Federal information that incorporate digitization, preservation, electronic metadata, and information retrieval. The FDLP's efforts to find new solutions will improve acquisitions, information access, and collection development for depository libraries. This article describes just a few of the initiatives GPO has undertaken to increase access to electronic U.S. Government information.     

A small-scale randomized efficacy trial of Carescapes: Enhancing children’s social development in child care homes

The quality of the child care environment and caregiver practices can potentially have significant, lasting impact on children’s social development. This study involves the development and a small-scale efficacy trial of the Carescapes program, a video-based training program that focuses on promoting positive social development in young children attending family child care. Fifty-seven caregivers who provided child care in their homes were randomly assigned to immediate intervention or waitlist control groups. Random coefficients analyses showed significant increased use of effective behavior management practices and decreased overall children’s problem behavior for the intervention group. A mediation model demonstrated that increases in effective behavior management practices were associated with decreases in problem behavior. A medium intervention effect was found for caregiver’s monitoring and a small effect for use of positive attention. These effects declined 5 months following the intervention. Implications for future efficacy and effectiveness studies in family child care settings that involve strategies to facilitate maintenance are discussed.     

癌症的病毒疗法

一种称为病毒治疗的新技术，采用“以毒攻毒”，用病毒去攻克癌症。     

Mother and infant talk about mental states relates to desire language and emotion understanding

This study assessed the relation between mother mental state language and child desire language and emotion understanding in 15-24-month-olds. At both time points, mothers described pictures to their infants and mother talk was coded for mental and nonmental state language. Children were administered 2 emotion understanding tasks and their mental and nonmental state vocabulary levels were obtained via parental report. The results demonstrated that mother use of desire language with 15-month-old children uniquely predicted a child's later mental state language and emotion task performance, even after accounting for potentially confounding variables. In addition, mothers' tendency to refer to the child's over others' desires was the more consistent correlate of mental state language and emotion understanding.