This book reviews theoretical and empirical work in the developmental approach to mental retardation. Armed with methods derived from the study of typically developing children, developmentalists have recently learned about the mentally retarded child's own development in a variety of areas. These areas now encompass many aspects of cognition, language, social and adaptive functioning, as well as of maladaptive behavior and psychopathology. In addition to a focus on individuals with mental retardation themselves, familial and other "ecological" factors have influenced developmental approaches to mental retardation. Comprised of twenty-seven chapters on various aspects of development, this handbook provides a timely, comprehensive guide to understanding mental retardation and development.

Atypical visual attention to faces and difficulty interpreting eye gaze cues are core deficits of autism that have widespread consequences for social communication. I evaluated if autistic adolescents display atypical visual processing strategies during perception of eye gaze cues and investigated if these could be altered through serious game intervention. To capture both spatial and temporal dimensions of visual processing strategies during eye gaze processing, I utilized a novel, data-driven computational modeling approach. This approach summarizes a participant's eye movements (fixation locations and sequence) with person-specific regions of interest (ROIs) and transition probabilities among ROIs using a hidden Markov model; These can be clustered to discover common patterns among all participants. I discovered "focused" (fixating narrowly to face first then to target object area) and "explorative" (fixating at diffuse area around the face then to target object area) eye movement patterns. Autistic adolescents tended to use a more explorative eye movement pattern during eye gaze perception, but this was not associated with their behavioral task performance at interpreting eye gaze cues. Furthermore, I found that autistic participants who completed a serious game intervention (treatment), showed a more focused eye movement pattern post-intervention compared to autistic adolescents that did not complete the intervention (control). At baseline, treatment and control participants did not differ in their likelihood of using focused or explorative patterns. However, post-intervention, the treatment group was more likely to use a focused pattern compared to the control group. Finally, I found that changes in eye movement patterns across time were differentially associated with improvement in task performance across time between treatment and control participants. In conclusion, these findings suggest that autistic individuals processing eye gaze in ways that are unique and malleable.

What does a child’s ability to look where another is looking tell us about his or her early cognitive development? What does this ability—or lack thereof—tell us about a child’s language development, understanding of other’s intentions, and the emergence of autism? This volume assembles several years of research on the processing of gaze information and its relationship to early social-cognitive development in infants spanning many age groups. Gaze-Following examines how humans and non-human primates use another individual’s direction of gaze to learn about the world around them. The chapters throughout this volume address development in areas including joint attention, early non-verbal social interactions, language development, and theory of mind understanding. Offering novel insights regarding the significance of gaze-following, the editors present research from a neurological and a behavioral perspective, and compare children with and without pervasive developmental disorders. Scholars in the areas of cognitive development specifically, and developmental science more broadly, as well as clinical psychologists will be interested in the intriguing research presented in this volume.

The distinguished contributors to this volume have been set the problem of describing how we know where to move our eyes. There is a great deal of current interest in the use of eye movement recordings to investigate various mental processes. The common theme is that variations in eye movements indicate variations in the processing of what is being perceived, whether in reading, driving or scene perception. However, a number of problems of interpretation are now emerging, and this edited volume sets out to address these problems. The book investigates controversies concerning the variations in eye movements associated with reading ability, concerning the extent to which text is used by the guidance mechanism while reading, concerning the relationship between eye movements and the control of other body movements, the relationship between what is inspected and what is perceived, and concerning the role of visual control attention in the acquisition of complex perceptual-motor skills, in addition to the nature of the guidance mechanism itself. The origins of the volume are in discussions held at a meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) that was held in Wurzburg in September 1996. The discussions concerned the landing effect in reading, an effect, that if substantiated, would provide evidence of the use of parafoveal information in eye guidance, and these discussions were explored in more detail at a small meeting in Chamonix, in February 1997. Many of the contributors to this volume were present at the meeting, but the arguments were not resolved in Chamonix either. Other leaders in the field were invited to contribute to the discussion, and this volume is the product. The argument remains unresolved, but the problem is certainly clearer.

In mainstream economics, and particularly in New Keynesian macroeconomics, the booms and busts that characterize capitalism arise because of large external shocks. The combination of these shocks and the slow adjustments of wages and prices by rational agents leads to cyclical movements.

Applying an evolutionary framework to advance the understanding of child development, this volume brings together leading figures to contribute chapters in their areas of expertise. Researcher- and student-friendly chapters adhere to a common format.