Three studies investigated developmental changes in facial expression processing, between 3 years-of-age and adulthood. For adults and older children, the addition of sunglasses to upright faces caused an equivalent decrement in performance to face inversion. However, younger children showed "better" classification of expressions of faces wearing…

Evidence from typical development and neuroimaging studies suggests that level 2 visual perspective taking--the knowledge that different people may see the same thing differently at the same time--is a mentalising task. Thus, we would expect children with autism, who fail typical mentalising tasks like false belief, to perform poorly on level 2…

Historically, it was believed the perceptual mechanisms involved in individuating faces developed only very slowly over the course of childhood, and that adult levels of expertise were not reached until well into adolescence. Over the last 10 years, there has been some erosion of this view by demonstrations that all adult-like behavioural…

Grapheme-color synesthesia, when achromatic digits evoke an experience of a specific color (photisms), has been shown to be consistent, involuntary, and linked with number concept in adults, yet there have been no comparable investigations with children. We present a systematic study of grapheme-color synesthesia in children aged between 7 and 15…

Explored the role of motion versus shape in children's categorization of animal and non-animal kinds. Found that 4-year olds significantly used motion cues over shape cues to categorize objects. Seven-year olds and adults tended to use motion more than shape to categorize animals but not geometric figures. Findings support view that children are…

A visual oddball paradigm was used to investigate whether children with high functioning autism had difficulty detecting mutual gaze under experimental conditions. Findings revealed that children with autism were no better at detecting direct gaze than at detecting averted gaze, unlike normal children. Findings suggest that the lack of ability to…