Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old. Caregivers were diverse in race-ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. Regression-adjusted impact analyses showed that 3-year-old program children performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less. The strongest and most numerous impacts were for programs that offered a mix of home-visiting and center-based services and that fully implemented the performance standards early.

Early Head Start, a federal program begun in 1995 for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers, was evaluated through a randomized trial of 3,001 families in 17 programs. Interviews with primary caregivers, child assessments, and observations of parent-child interactions were completed when children were 3 years old. Caregivers were diverse in race-ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. Regression-adjusted impact analyses showed that 3-year-old program children performed better than did control children in cognitive and language development, displayed higher emotional engagement of the parent and sustained attention with play objects, and were lower in aggressive behavior. Compared with controls, Early Head Start parents were more emotionally supportive, provided more language and learning stimulation, read to their children more, and spanked less. The strongest and most numerous impacts were for programs that offered a mix of home-visiting and center-based services and that fully implemented the performance standards early.

Three studies examined associations between early child care and child outcomes among families different from those in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Child Care Research Network study. Results suggest that quality is an important influence on children's development and may be an important moderator of the amount of time in care. Thus, the generalizability of the NICHD findings may hinge on the context in which those results were obtained. These studies, conducted in three national contexts, with different regulatory climates, ranges of child care quality, and a diversity of family characteristics, suggest a need for more complete estimates of how both quality and quantity of child care may influence a range of young children's developmental outcomes.

No abstract

Six-month-old infants trained in an operant conditioning procedure were allowed to forget the contingency and were presented with a reminder in a memory-reactivation paradigm. The time course of memory retrieval after the reminder, the relation between the forgetting functions of the newly acquired and the reactivated memory, and the potential contribution of the context to retention after long delays were investigated. Memory retrieval was found to be a time-locked process at 6 months, as at 3 months. Although retrieval was more rapid at the older age, the reactivated memory was more transient than the newly acquired memory at 6 months and remained accessible for a briefer period than at 3 months. A distinctive context was requisite for memory reactivation at 6 months but did not insure it. These studies reveal that the temporal parameters of memory processing change with age.Research on learning and memory development over the first half-year of life has shown that older infants learn faster and remember longer (Gekoski, 1977;Hill, Borovsky, & Rovee-Collier, 1988). Hill et al, for example, found that 6-month-olds acquired an operant contingency in one third of the time required by 3-month-olds and remembered it after a retention interval twice as long, despite the fact that 6-month-olds had less total training time. Two-month-olds, on the other hand, require at least twice as long as 3-month-olds to acquire the same contingency, and they forget after retention intervals only half as long (Greco, Rovee-Collier, Hayne, Griesler, & Earley, 1986). Similar findings have been obtained in studies of learning and memory development in animal infants (Campbell & Campbell, 1962). Findings such as these have been taken as evidence that memories of older infants, both animal and human, are mediated by a fundamentally different system than memories of younger infants (Bachvalier & Mishkin, 1984;Schacter & Moscovitch, 1984).In both animal and human infants of all ages, however, memories are forgotten gradually, can be recovered by a reactivation procedure, and are context-specific (