Mental rotation, the cognitive process of moving an object in mind to predict how it looks in a new orientation, is coupled to intelligence, learning, and educational achievement. On average, adolescent and adult males solve mental rotation tasks slightly better (i.e., faster and/or more accurate) than females. When such behavioral differences…

A range of demographic variables influences how much speech young children hear. However, because studies have used vastly different sampling methods, quantitative comparison of interlocking demographic effects has been nearly impossible, across or within studies. We harnessed a unique collection of existing naturalistic, day-long recordings from…

Some cognitive abilities exhibit reliable gender differences, with females outperforming males in specific aspects of verbal ability, and males showing an advantage on certain spatial tasks. Among these cognitive gender differences, differences in mental rotation are the most robust, and appear to be present even in infants. A large body of animal…

Self-regulatory behavior in early childhood is an important characteristic that has considerable implications for the development of adaptive and maladaptive functioning. The present study investigated the relations between a functional polymorphism in the upstream region of monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) and self-regulatory behavior in a sample…

Maternal cortisol levels (at 15, 19, 25, 31 and 37 weeks' gestation) and fetal movement response to vibroacoustic stimulation (VAS; at 25, 31 and 37 weeks) were assessed in 190 mother-fetus pairs. Fetuses showed a response to the VAS at 25 weeks and there was evidence of increasing maturation in the response at 31 and 37 weeks. Early elevations in…

Early post-natal nutrition influences later development, but there are no studies comparing brain function in healthy infants as a function of dietary intake even though the major infant diets differ significantly in nutrient composition. We studied brain responses (event-related potentials; ERPs) to speech sounds for infants who were fed either…

Adult colour preference has been summarized quantitatively in terms of weights on the two fundamental neural processes that underlie early colour encoding: the S-(L+M) ("blue-yellow") and L-M ("red-green") cone-opponent contrast channels ( Ling, Hurlbert & Robinson, 2006; Hurlbert & Ling, 2007). Here, we investigate whether colour preference in…

We know that early experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing, but we know little about how infants learn to distinguish faces from different races, especially for non-Caucasian populations. Moreover, it is unknown whether differential processing of different race faces observed in typically studied monoracial infants…

Auditory processing capabilities at the subcortical level have been hypothesized to impact an individual's development of both language and reading abilities. The present study examined whether auditory processing capabilities relate to language development in healthy 9-month-old infants. Participants were 71 infants (31 boys and 40 girls) with…

Previous research has indicated that 70-85% of women and girls show a bias to hold infants, or dolls, to the left side of their body. This bias is not matched in males (e.g. deChateau, Holmberg & Winberg, 1978; Todd, 1995). This study tests an explanation of cradling preferences in terms of hemispheric specialization for the perception of facial…