The developmental trajectories of selective and divided attention were examined in relation to the processing of hierarchically integrated stimuli. The participants included children in 4 age groups (6, 8, 10, and 12 years) and a group of young adults (24 years) who completed 2 computer-based attention tasks. In the selective attention task, 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…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…

This study investigated how global and local perceptual processes evolve during childhood according to the meaningfulness of the stimuli. Children had to decide whether visually presented pairs of items were identical or not. Items consisted of global forms made up of local forms. Both global and local forms could represent either objects or…

Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor…

Results provided evidence that 6- and 12-week-old infants' preferences for a moving set of stripes over a stationary set were based on the velocity rather than on the temporal frequency of stripe movement. Estimated velocity thresholds of 9 degrees per second for 6 week olds and 4 degrees per second for 12 week olds extended results of previous…

Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information such as internal properties and perceptual similarity on 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds' interpretations of labels. Results suggested that children have essentialist beliefs about animals, but not about artifacts, and that these beliefs interact with children's assumptions about word meaning…