The development of the ability to anticipate--as manifested by preparatory actions and neural activation related to the expectation of an upcoming stimulus--may play a key role in the ontogeny of cognitive skills more broadly. This preregistered study examined anticipatory brain potentials and behavioral responses (reaction time; RT) to…

Newborns are able to neurally discriminate between speech and nonspeech right after birth. To date it remains unknown whether this early speech discrimination and the underlying neural language network is associated with later language development. Preterm-born children are an interesting cohort to investigate this relationship, as previous…

Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here,…

Young children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size--they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children's action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional…

Speech perception deficits are commonly reported in dyslexia but longitudinal evidence that poor speech perception compromises learning to read is scant. We assessed the hypothesis that phonological skills, specifically phoneme awareness and RAN, mediate the relationship between speech perception and reading. We assessed longitudinal predictive…

The mature visual system condenses complex scenes into simple summary statistics (e.g., average size, location, orientation, etc.). However, children, often perform poorly on perceptual averaging tasks. Children's difficulties are typically thought to represent the suboptimal implementation of an adult-like strategy. This paper examines another…

The direct influence of phonological awareness (PA) on reading outcomes has been widely demonstrated, yet PA may also exert indirect influence on reading outcomes through other cognitive variables such as morphological awareness (MA). However, PA's own development is dependent and influenced by many extraneous variables such as auditory…

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

Research has established that the body is fundamentally involved in perception: bodily experience influences activation of the shared neural system underlying action perception and production during action observation, and bodily characteristics influence perception of the spatial environment. However, whether bodily characteristics influence…

Infants in low-resource settings are at heightened risk for compromised cognitive development due to a multitude of environmental insults in their surroundings. However, the onset of adverse outcomes and trajectory of cognitive development in these settings is not well understood. The aims of the present study were to adapt the Mullen Scales of…

Recent work implicates a link between action control systems and action understanding. In this study, we investigated the role of the motor system in the development of visual anticipation of others' actions. Twelve-month-olds engaged in behavioral and observation tasks. "Containment activity", infants' spontaneous engagement in producing…

Previous research shows that sensory and motor systems interact during perception, but how these connections among systems are created during development is unknown. The current work exposes young children to novel "verbs" and objects through either (a) actively exploring the objects or (b) by seeing an experimenter interact with the objects.…

Despite well-documented attention deficits in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), distinctions across types of attention problems and their association with academic attainment has not been fully explored. This study examines visual attention capacities and inattentive/hyperactive behaviours in 77 children aged 4 to…

Electroencephalographic recordings (EEG) were used to assess age-associated differences in nonlinear brain dynamics during both rest and auditory oddball performance in children aged 9.0-12.8 years, younger adults, and older adults. We computed nonlinear coupling dynamics and dimensional complexity, and also determined spectral alpha power as an…

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual…