Data from a random cohort of residents in a 2-county area were used to determine the stability in 2 major dimensions of childhood behavior between 2 generations. The 1st generation was assessed at mean age 7, and their offspring were assessed at age 2 years. Measures were used in latent-variable structural equation models to test the hypotheses. Strong stability in these behavior patterns in the 1st generation was shown between early childhood and a reassessment 8 years later. There was a significant stability between generations in the inhibited behavior pattern but not in the difficult pattern. This relationship was stronger when parents had been assessed at an age closer to that of their toddler offspring. Findings are consistent for mother-offspring, father-offspring, and daughter and son subsamples.

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The perception of relational information such as the correlation or co-occurrence among features should play a central role in abilities ranging from the perception and recognition of a simple pattern or object to the formation of a category. 4 experiments were conducted to examine developmental change in 4-, 7-, and 10-month-old infants' perception of correlations among attributes. The results suggested a developmental progression in infants' processing of simple correlational information, ranging from the processing of independent featural information only at 4 months, the perception of relations among features of a single pattern at 7 months, to the abstraction of invariant relations from a category at 10 months.

Six-month-old infants' ability to form an abstract category of containment was examined using a standard infant categorization task. Infants were habituated to 4 pairs of objects in a containment relation. Following habituation, infants were tested with a novel example of the familiar containment relation and an example of an unfamiliar relation. Results indicate that infants look reliably longer at the unfamiliar versus familiar relation, indicating that they can form a categorical representation of containment. A second experiment demonstrated that infants do not rely on object occlusion to discriminate containment from a support or a behind spatial relation. Together, the results indicate that by 6 months, infants can recognize a containment relation from different angles and across different pairs of objects.