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…

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…

Although infants begin learning about their environment before they are born, little is known about how the infant brain changes during learning. Here, we take the initial steps in documenting how the neural responses in the brain change as infants learn to associate audio and visual stimuli. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS) to…

We recently proposed a multi-channel, image-filtering model for simulating the development of visual selective attention in young infants (Schlesinger, Amso & Johnson, 2007). The model not only captures the performance of 3-month-olds on a visual search task, but also implicates two cortical regions that may play a role in the development of…

The nature of word recognition difficulties in developmental dyslexia is still a topic of controversy. We investigated the contribution of phonological processing deficits and uncertainty to the word recognition difficulties of dyslexic children by mathematical diffusion modeling of visual and auditory lexical decision data. The first study showed…

Change blindness describes the surprising difficulty of detecting large changes in visual scenes when changes occur during a visual disruption. In order to study the developmental course of this phenomenon, a modified version of the flicker paradigm, based on Rensink, O'Regan & Clark (1997), was given to three groups of children aged 6-12 years…

How much of infant behaviour can be accounted for by signal-level analyses of stimuli? The current paper directly compares the moment-by-moment behaviour of 8-month-old infants in an audiovisual preferential looking task with that of several computational models that use the same video stimuli as presented to the infants. One type of model…

Several researchers have proposed that developmental improvements in children's face recognition abilities might reflect an increasing reliance on configural information (i.e. spatial relations between features) in faces (Carey & Diamond, 1994; Mondloch, Le Grand & Maurer, 2002). We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' use of configural information…