ABSTRACT
Our views of the human infant have changed radically over the past thirty years. One of the most salient of these views was the idea that cognitive or intellectual function in childhood was unpredictable from infancy (Fagen, 1995). From the 1930s through the 1970s, it was widely demonstrated that infant sensorimotor performance did not reliably predict to measures of intellectual function in childhood. As a result, it was widely held that cognitive development underwent a reorganization between infancy and school age, and thus was “discontinuous” across this time span (McCall & Mash, 1995). During the early 1980s, however, modest but statistically significant correlations were observed between measures of infant cognitive performance and childhood measures of intelligence and language (e.g., Fagan & McGrath, 1981). Demonstrations of the relationship between early and later intellectual function have since been repeated for a number of variables in numerous reports (e.g., Bornstein & Sigman, 1986; Colombo, 1993, 1997). Given that some aspects of cognitive performance in infancy predicts to intellectual status in childhood, some qualities and/or quantities of cognitive function have come to be regarded as “continuous” from infancy (Bornstein & Sigman, 1986). The ability of measures of infant cognitive performance to predict childhood cognition and intelligence is the focus of this chapter, and we will hereafter refer to this as the prediction phenomenon.
