To determine whether children retain a preference for a previously accurate informant only in the short term or for long-term use, 3- and 4-year-old children were tested in two experiments. In both experiments, children were given accuracy information about two informants and were subsequently tested for their selective trust in the two informants…

Combining theoretical hypotheses of infant cognition and adult perception, we present evidence that infants can maintain visual representations despite their failure to detect a change. Infants under 12 months typically fail to notice a change to an object's height in a covering event. The present experiments demonstrated that 11-month-old infants…

Previous studies have suggested that typically developing 6-month-old infants are able to discriminate between small and large numerosities. However, discrimination between small numerosities in young infants is only possible when variables continuous with number (e.g. area or circumference) are confounded. In contrast, large number discrimination…

While there is evidence for an association between the development of reading and arithmetic, the precise locus of this relationship remains to be determined. Findings from cognitive neuroscience research that point to shared neural correlates for phonological processing and arithmetic as well as recent behavioral evidence led to the present…

Previous research suggests that competition among the objects present during referent selection influences young children's ability to learn words in fast mapping tasks. The present study systematically explored this issue with 30-month-old children. Children first received referent selection trials with a target object and either two, three or…

Spatial construction tasks are basic tests of visual-spatial processing. Two studies have assessed spatial construction skills in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and young children (Homo sapiens sapiens) with a block modelling task. Study 1a subjects were three young chimpanzees and five adult chimpanzees. Study 1b subjects were 30 human children…

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…

Temporal order judgements (TOJ) for two tactile stimuli, one presented to the left and one to the right hand, are less precise when the hands are crossed over the midline than when the hands are uncrossed. This "crossed hand" effect has been considered as evidence for a remapping of tactile input into an external reference frame. Since late, but…

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…

Sleep has been shown to aid a variety of learning and memory processes in adults (Stickgold, 2005 ). Recently, we showed that infants' learning also benefits from subsequent sleep such that infants who nap are able to abstract the general grammatical pattern of a briefly presented artificial language (Gomez, Bootzin & Nadel, 2006 ). In the present…

Our objectives were to document and examine socioeconomic gradients across a comprehensive set of child development measures in a population living in extreme poverty, and to interpret these gradients in light of findings from the neuroscience literature. We assessed a nationally representative sample of 3-6-year-old children (n = 1332) from 150…

The effects of environmental stimulation and parental nurturance on brain development have been studied extensively in animals. Much less is known about the relations between childhood experience and cognitive development in humans. Using a longitudinally collected data set with ecologically valid in-home measures of childhood experience and later…

Evidence suggests that visual processing is divided into the dorsal ("how") and ventral ("what") streams. We examined the normal development of these streams and their breakdown under neurological deficit by comparing performance of normally developing children and Williams syndrome individuals on two tasks: a visually guided action ("how") task,…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show a specific deficit in visuo-spatial abilities. This finding, however, derives mainly from performance on small-scale laboratory-based tasks. This study investigated large-scale route learning in individuals with WS and two matched control groups (moderate learning difficulty group [MLD], typically…