The relation between perceptual and conceptual knowledge is a longstanding research question in developmental psychology. Here we tested children's dependence on figurative information with a reaction time/accuracy task. A sample of 151 children from 5 to 10 years were assessed from two multicultural and multiracial schools in the London (UK)…

Handled artifacts are ubiquitous in human technology, but how young children engage in spatially coordinated behaviors with these artifacts is not well understood. To address this issue, children (N = 30) from 17-36 months were studied with motion tracking technology as they fit the distal segment of a handled artifact into a slot. The handle was…

Saccade latency is widely used across infant psychology to investigate infants' understanding of events. Interpreting particular latency values requires knowledge of standard saccadic RTs, but there is no consensus as to typical values. This study provides standard estimates of infants' (n = 194, ages 9 to 15 months) saccadic RTs under a range of…

Movement perception facilitates spatial orienting of attention in infants (Farroni, Johnson, Brockbank, & Simion, 2000). In a series of 4 experiments, we investigated how orienting of attention in infancy is modulated by dynamic stimuli. Experiment 1 (N = 36) demonstrated that 5-month-olds as well as 7-month-olds orient to the direction of a…

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…

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…

A modified Visual Expectation Paradigm assessed the role of picture content in the spatiotemporal expectations of 80 infants. Stable picture content information facilitated formation of expectations about when and where pictures would appear. Two month olds' reactions were consistently slower than those of three month olds.(LB)

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower…

Three experiments with observers aged 6 to 21 years of age examined the integration of shape information over successive glances. Results indicated age-related improvements in the sequential integration of shape information, both when integration occurs through successive glimpses over space and when information is separated only in time. (HOD)

Two studies of adults between the ages of 18 and 87 were conducted to determine the relations among age, motor speed, perceptual speed and 3 measures of cognitive performance: study time, decision time, and decision accuracy. Results indicated that increased age was associated with lower accuracy as well as with longer study and decision time.…