Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here…

Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially…

The "other-race" effect describes the phenomenon in which faces are difficult to distinguish from one another if they belong to an ethnic or racial group to which the observer has had little exposure. Adult observers typically display multiple forms of recognition error for other-race faces, and infants exhibit behavioral evidence of a developing…

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…

Twelve-month-olds realize that when an agent cannot see an object, her incomplete perceptions still guide her goal-directed actions. What would happen if the agent had incomplete perceptions because she could see only one part of the object, for example one side of a screen? In the present research, 16-month-olds were first shown an agent who…

Two experiments examined developmental changes in children's visual recognition of common objects during the period of 18 to 24 months. Experiment 1 examined children's ability to recognize common category instances that presented three different kinds of information: (1) richly detailed and prototypical instances that presented both local and…

Over the past 30 years researchers have learned a great deal about the development of object processing in infancy. In contrast, little is understood about the neural mechanisms that underlie this capacity, in large part because there are few techniques available to measure brain functioning in human infants. The present research examined the…

We report a new method for calibrating differences in perceptual salience across feature dimensions, in infants. The problem of inter-dimensional salience arises in many areas of infant studies, but a general method for addressing the problem has not previously been described. Our method is based on a preferential looking paradigm, adapted to…

Changes to a scene often go unnoticed if the objects of the change are unattended, making change detection an index of where attention is focused during scene perception. We measured change detection in school-age children and young adults by repeatedly alternating two versions of an image. To provide an age-fair assessment we used a bimanual…

Absent reference comprehension is a critical achievement of early development, yet little is known about its emergence. In the current study, 12- and 16-month-old infants' recognition of properties of mentioned absent things was used as an index of absent reference comprehension. Infants were presented with displays matching the color and prior…

Research using the visual paired comparison task has shown that visual recognition memory across changing contexts is dependent on the integrity of the hippocampal formation in human adults and in monkeys. The acquisition of contextual flexibility may contribute to the change in memory performance that occurs late in the first year of life. To…