Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based…

Visual attention is one of the infant's primary tools for gathering relevant information from the environment for further processing and learning. The space-based component of visual attention in infants has been widely investigated; however, the object-based component of visual attention has received scarce interest. This scarcity is…

Although a fair amount is known about young children's production of negation, little is known about their comprehension. Here, we focus on arguably the most complex basic form, denial, and how young children understand denial, when it is expressed in response to a question with gesture, single word, or sentence. One hundred twenty-six children in…

Early selective attention skills are a crucial building block for cognitive development, as attention orienting serves as a primary means by which infants interact with and learn from the environment. Although several studies have examined infants' attention orienting using the spatial cueing task, relatively few studies have examined…

The present study aims to investigate the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication with respect to infants' perception of pointing gestures. Infants were presented with still images of pointing hands (cue) in combination with an acoustic stimulus. The communicative content of this acoustic stimulus was varied from being human and…

What cognitive processes influence how well we maintain information in visual short-term memory (VSTM)? We used a developmentally informed design to delve into the interplay of top-down spatial biases with the nature of the internal memory codes, motivated by documented changes for both factors over childhood. Seven-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and…

The authors investigated the ability of 9- to 11-year-olds and of adults to use similarity-based and rule-based processes as a function of task characteristics in a task that can be considered either a categorization task or a multiple-cue judgment task, depending on the nature of the criterion (binary vs. continuous). Both children and adults…

This study investigated the visual information that children and adults consider while switching or maintaining object-matching rules. Eye movements of 5- and 6-year-old children and adults were collected with two versions of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between shape- and color-matching rules. In addition to…

Three experiments assessed the claim that preschoolers override form class cues in the interest of honoring word- meaning assumptions when acquiring new labels. Results demonstrated that children respected the form class cues when these cues and word-meaning assumptions suggested conflicting interpretations. It was suggested that past findings…

Three experiments tested 21- and 27-month olds' ability to construct a path to a mentally re-presented goal. After seeing the goal-state configuration of problems, both age groups evinced planning. Demonstration of initial solution step was less effective than goal-state exposure. Even with specification of a greater proportion of the goal path,…

Two studies demonstrated that infants use referential cues to guide new word-object mapping as early as 19 to 20 months of age and that they understood that actions accompanying such labeling were not necessarily referential. These findings indicate that language learning is grounded in a relatively rich understanding of cues to reference, at…

Discusses two experiments in which middle-aged, elderly, professional, and non-professional males and females were given the Conceptual Styles Test. An analysis of variance on the percentage of complementary responses revealed significant effects for age, occupation, and th interaction between age and sex. (ED)

The development of ordering and correspondence operations, under varying degrees of the presence of length cues to number, was studied in 91 preschool children. Findings are interpreted in terms of the young child's difficulty in separating and coordinating the dimensions of length and number. (Author/ED)

A series of stimuli designed to assess the dependence of children's cardinal number judgments on relative length and relative density cues was administered to 4- and 6-year-old children. (SB)