Sense enables babies to perceive the physical and chemical changes that occur in the external environment. It occurs as a result of the dynamic interaction of sensory stimuli with sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin. The stimuli that newborns see, touch, and hear affect their brain development. The brain develops faster in…

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…

As adults, we represent and think about number, space, and time in at least two ways: our intuitive--but imprecise--perceptual representations, and the slowly learned--but precise--number words. With development, these representational formats interface, allowing us to use precise number words to estimate imprecise perceptual experiences. We test…

Children rely on their Approximate Number System to intuitively perceive number. Such adaptations often exhibit sensitivity to real-world statistics. This study investigates a potential manifestation of the ANS's sensitivity to real-world statistics: a negative power-law distribution of objects in natural scenes should be reflected in children's…

Sensory learning can be traced back to ancient Greek times, and the sense of touch holds multiple types of benefits for classroom music learning. Touch is also a prerequisite for children's future intellectual and social development. Between ages three and seven, a child's physical and perceptual development is in a formational stage. Despite…

The research focuses on the diagnostics and stimulation of socially disadvantaged children of a preschool age, which is a crucial component of inclusive education. The aim of the research was to experimentally verify through input and output orientation diagnostics the effectiveness of the stimulation program for 5 to 6 year old socially…

Before they even talk, infants become sensitive to the speech sounds of their native language and recognize the auditory form of an increasing number of words. Traditionally, these early perceptual changes are attributed to an emerging knowledge of linguistic categories such as phonemes or words. However, there is growing skepticism surrounding…

By the end of primary school, children are expected to acquire a range of mathematical skills that progressively develop. This study aimed to gain insight into how a large number of numerical and geometrical measures are grouped and whether the structures shift or remain invariant along child's development based on the data obtained from a sample…

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of…

While child development is well-recognized as a complex process which could hardly be decomposed into separate lines or domains in contemporary psychological theories, the decomposition approach is widely used in empirical studies. Based on the cultural-historical theory, this study argues for adopting the unit of analysis as a way to bridge this…

Two experiments examined the development of the ability to encode, maintain, and update integrated representations of occluded objects' locations and featural identities in working memory across toddlerhood. Sixty-eight 28- to 40-month-old US toddlers (13 Asian or Pacific Islander, 6 Black, 48 White, 1 multiracial; 40 girls; tested between…

There is no other stage in life where physical growth and motor skills development undergo such rapid changes comprehensively impacting children's overall development than the early and preschool years. Motor skills proficiency contributes to cognitive, social-emotional and academic development and closely connects to positive transition…

Purpose: Our objective is to describe the moderating effect of the level of gross motor development on the relationship between physical activity (PA) level and visual perception/memory in girls. Methods: This is a quantitative cross-sectional study with a randomized sample of 85 girls (mean age 7.11±0.74) from Chile. The following models were…

When perceiving emotional facial expressions, adults use a template-matching strategy, comparing the perceived face with a stored representation. A rejection of unnaturally exaggerated faces is characteristic of this strategy because the exaggerated expressions do not match the stored template. In contrast, a rule-based perceptual strategy (e.g.,…