We present an exact replication of Experiment 2 from Kovács and Mehler's 2009 study, which showed that 7-month-old infants who are raised bilingually exhibit a cognitive advantage. In the experiment, a sound cue, following an AAB or ABB pattern, predicted the appearance of a visual stimulus on the screen. The stimulus appeared on one side of the…

These studies investigate the influence of adults' explicit attention to commonalities of appearance on children's preference for individuals resembling themselves. Three findings emerged: (1) An adult's identification of two dolls' respective similarity to and difference from the child led 3-year-olds to prefer the similar doll (study 1, n = 32).…

Working memory (WM) improves dramatically during childhood but what drives this improvement is not well understood. One influential account thus far has proposed a simple increase in storage capacity. However, recent findings have shown that multiple factors, such as differences in the ability to use attention to enhance the maintenance of…

The ability to attend to one among multiple sources of information is central to everyday functioning. Just as central is the ability to switch attention among competing inputs as the task at hand changes. Such processes develop surprisingly slowly, such that even into adolescence, we remain slower and more error prone at switching among tasks…

Perception of the ordinal position of a sequence element is critical to many cognitive and motor functions. Here, the prediction that this ability is based on a domain-general perceptual mechanism and, thus, that it emerges prior to the emergence of language was tested. Infants were habituated with sequences of moving/sounding objects and then…

Being able to see a talking face confers a considerable advantage for speech perception in adulthood. However, behavioural data currently suggest that children fail to make full use of these available visual speech cues until age 8 or 9. This is particularly surprising given the potential utility of multiple informational cues during language…

The present study examined the hypothesis that inhibitory visual selection mechanisms play a vital role in memory by limiting distractor interference during item encoding. In Experiment 1a we used a modified spatial cueing task in which 9-month-old infants encoded multiple category exemplars in the contexts of an attention orienting mechanism…

This study explored the criteria that children and adults use when evaluating the niceness of a character who is distributing resources. Four- and five-year-olds played the "Giving Game", in which two puppets with different amounts of chips each gave some portion of these chips to the children. Adults played an analogous task that mimicked the…

Three-year-olds were given a search task with conflicting cues about the target's location. A ball rolled behind a transparent screen and stopped behind one of four opaque doors mounted into the screen. A wall that protruded above one door provided a visible cue of blockage in the ball's path, while the transparent screen allowed visual tracking…

The conditional intervention principle is a formal principle that relates patterns of interventions and outcomes to causal structure. It is a central assumption of experimental design and the causal Bayes net formalism. Two studies suggest that preschoolers can use the conditional intervention principle to distinguish causal chains, common cause…

The use of gaze shifts as social cues has various evolutionary advantages. To investigate the developmental processes of this ability, we conducted an object-choice task by using longitudinal methods with infant chimpanzees tested from 8 months old until 3 years old. The experimenter used one of six gestures towards a cup concealing food; tapping,…

Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called "pedagogy" ( Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity,…