This commentary provides a critical discussion of current research investigating the correlates and determinants of physical activity in young people, with specific focus on conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues. We draw on current child and adolescent literature and our own collective expertise to illustrate our discussion. We conclude with recommendations that will strengthen futu...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate changes of anger scores in female karate athletes during 18 months, and to compare anger scores in adolescents who continue or stop training karate. METHOD The sample consisted of 18 female elite karate athletes, practicing modern style of karate. To measure anger and its subscales, participants were asked to complete "Adolescent Anger Rating Sc...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine whether switch control site (hand vs. head) affects the age at which children can successfully activate a computer to play a cause-and-effect game. METHOD The sample consisted of 72 participants randomly divided into two groups (head switch and hand switch), with stratification for gender and age (9-11 months, 12-14 months, 15-17 months). A...

Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words (cup primes cat or plate) compared to unrelated words (door), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but also related words. We investigate the phonological organ...

This study investigated infant social looking in a social referencing procedure with mothers and strangers. Sixty-one infants and their mothers participated when the infants were 18 and 24 months old. The frequency and latency of looking toward each adult when the baby encountered remotecontrolled ambiguous toys were measured. Mothers and strangers (female experimenters) expressed positive or n...

Mental representation of absent objects and events is a major cognitive achievement. Research is presented that explores how toddlers (2- to 3-year-old children) search for hidden objects and understand out-of-sight events. Younger children fail to use visually obvious cues, such as a barrier that blocks a moving object's path. Spatiotemporal information provided by movement cues directly conne...

PURPOSE The proliferation of new communication technologies and capabilities has prompted concern about driving safety. This concern is particularly acute for inexperienced adolescent drivers. In addition to being early adopters of technology, many adolescents have not achieved the degree of automaticity in driving that characterizes experienced adults. Consequently, distractions may be more pr...

Sixty-three mother-toddler dyads took part in a 6-month prospective study that examined how differences in the frequency and nature of early mother-toddler conflict related to individual differences in children's subsequent socioemotional development. When the children were 30 months, mothers and children participated in a series of laboratory tasks and in a 1.5-hr unstructured home observation...

Review of the cycloplegic refractions of all children who were first examined at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston between 1968 and 1978 revealed that 281 children between the ages of 0 and 9.5 years had astigmatism of 1 diopter (D) or greater but no other ophthalmological or neurological problems. In the 85 children under 3.5 years of age, against-the-rule astigmatism was 2.5 times ...

Any theory of language must account for how children learn verbs, the gateway to grammar. Yet verbs can be difficult to learn. Building on Gentner's 'natural partitions hypothesis' we suggest that, to learn a verb, infants must conceptualize components of events and map verbs in the ambient language onto those components. Although toddlers detect and categorize at least some of the conceptual u...