Our ability to perceive our own and other people's bodies is critical to the success of social interactions. Research has shown that adults have a distorted perception of their own body and those of other adults. However, these studies ask perceivers to estimate for adults with a similar bodily make-up. This study explored the developmental…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

This research examined how 5-, 8-, and 11-month-olds with female primary caregivers mentally represented faces using a familiarization procedure similar to real-world experience in which infants have greater exposure to female faces aged 21-39 years than other face types. We predicted infants would form weighted representations of faces (i.e.,…

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a "developmental cascade" for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the…

Using the concepts of sensory and affective experience, this work relates the concepts of socialization and cognitive development to the embodiment of gender in the human infant. Evidence obtained from biweekly observations from 30 children and their mothers observed from age 3 months to age 12 months revealed measurable sex-related differences in…

The potential effect of gender on intellectual abilities remains controversial. The purpose of this research was to analyze gender differences in cognitive test performance among children from continuous age groups. For this purpose, the normative data from 7 domains of the newly developed neuropsychological test battery, the Evaluacion…

Two experiments were reported that aimed at investigating the development of spatial analysis of hierarchical patterns in children between 3 and 9 years of age. A total of 108 children participated in the drawing experiment, and 224 children were tested in a force-choice similarity judgment task. In both tasks, participants were exposed to…

This 1-year longitudinal study examined early adolescents' (N=278, age 11-13 years) perceptions of their mother's behavior (affection, knowledge of child's activities, and psychological control) and of how they react to their mother (trust in mother, defiance, and debilitation) as predictors of self-esteem among peers. Perceived maternal affection…