Sensorimotor difficulties are common in children with autism spectrum disorder, and it has been suggested that motor planning problems underlie their atypical movements. At early school-age, motor planning development typically involves changes in visuomotor integration, a function known to be affected in autism spectrum disorder. However, there…

Practicing a visual task commonly results in improved performance. Often the improvement does not transfer well to a new retinal location, suggesting that it is mediated by changes occurring in early visual cortex, and indeed neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies both demonstrate that perceptual learning is associated with altered activity…

Recently, Redford (2010) found that monkeys seemed to exert metacognitive control in a category-learning paradigm. Specifically, they selected more trials to view as the difficulty of the category-learning task increased. However, category-learning difficulty was determined by manipulating the family resemblance across the to-be-learned exemplars.…

The present study examined two key aspects of young children's ability to explain human behaviour in a mentalistic way. First, we explored desires that are of a level of difficulty comparable with that of false beliefs. For this purpose, the so-called "alternative desires" were created. Second, we examined how children's psychological…

Aesthetic preferences for overlapping geometrical figures were studied in subjects ages 6 through 14 in the context of the theory of functional pleasure. Results confirmed the hypothesis that the complexity level (number of crossings) of the preferred stimulus varies with the subjects' perceptual capacities, which develop with age. (Author/SJL)

Preschool children copied peg locations with standardized comparison pegboards aligned horizontally and diagonally and with three levels of pegboard complexity. Error patterns varied with type of alignment and display complexity. Results failed to support Bryant's hypothesis that mirror image confusions are no more frequent than other in-line…

Assesses the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks; explores the relation between parents' perceived difficulty and children's perceived and actual competence in these two domains; and determines whether the ease or difficulty of these child rearing tasks, as perceived by parents, varies as a function of the…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in reasoning about intensive quantities--predicting mixture intensity of pairs of liquids with different intensities of red color. Results showed that cognitive averaging in this domain developed late and slowly. Predominating up to 12 years was an extensivity bias, a strong tendency to use rules that…

Adults' ability to track a moving target was examined in two experiments in order to compare their performance with that of very young infants. Results indicated that (1) adults'"overshoot" errors resembled those reported for young infants; and (2) adults had problems tracking a moving target which unexpectedly changed direction. (Author/DB)

Tests seven- , 10- , and 13-year-olds for developmental differences in processes and strategies involved in geometric matrix solution and the relationship between strategy differences and item complexity. (AS)