Variability in children's language acquisition is likely due to a number of cognitive and social variables. The current study investigated whether individual differences in statistical learning (SL), which has been implicated in language acquisition, independently predicted 6- to 8-year-old's comprehension of syntax. Sixty-eight (N = 68)…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized in an investigation of 21 six-month-olds' attention to and processing of global and local properties of hierarchical patterns. Overall, infants demonstrated an advantage for processing the overall configuration (i.e., global properties) of local features of hierarchical patterns; however,…

Although some evidence indicates that even very young children engage in rudimentary forms of strategic behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that uncertainty monitoring underlies such behaviors. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children ("N" = 88) completed a perceptual…

Habituation to single female faces and to single geometric patterns was observed separately in two groups of infants who participated in two sessions separated by 10 days. Habituation was found to be distributed into three patterns and showed moderate but significant reliability between assessment sessions. (Author/RH)

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that the differences in infants' time of looking at a stimulus are due to infants' differential sensitivity to global and local visual information. Found that both long- and short-looking four-month-old infants were sensitive to both types of information. These results do not support the hypothesis. (MDM)

Four experiments tested four month olds on visual discrimination tasks. As the time allotted to solve these problems was shortened, infants who looked at stimuli for a short amount of time performed better than other infants, indicating that performance superiority was attributable to speed of processing. (BC)

Investigated whether individual and developmental differences in look duration were correlated with latency to disengage fixation from a visual stimulus for 3- and 4-month olds. Found that look duration was correlated with disengagement latency. Three-month olds showed slower latencies than 4-month olds. Long-looking infants showed greater…

This investigation also studied the relationship between gestational age and preferences for contour. (CB)

Purpose of this study was to test the adequacy of the serial habituation hypothesis as an account of the infant's perceptual commerce with visual stimuli. (Author)

Study investigated whether the observed individual differences in visual pursuit endure beyond the neonatal period. (Authors/MB)

Eye movements of 12-week-old infants were recorded in a visual encoding experiment. Results showed that infants who encoded more slowly scanned less extensively over the stimulus and engaged in prolonged fixation. An experiment with two-week olds showed significant age differences in the manner of visual scanning. (BC)