Children's ability to recognize emotional expressions from faces and bodies develops during childhood. However, the low-level features that support accurate body emotion recognition during development have not been well characterized. This is in marked contrast to facial emotion recognition, which is known to depend upon specific spatial frequency…

We investigated the ability to detect a face among other visual objects in a complex visual array in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children, as well as in adults. To this end, we used a visual search paradigm implemented on a touch-tablet device. Subjects (N = 100) saw up to eighty 3 × 3 visual search arrays and had to find and tap upon a target--a face…

This current study examined human children's and adults' automatic processing of proportion using a Stroop-like paradigm. Preschool children and university students compared the areas of two sectors that varied not only in absolute areas but also in the proportions they occupied in their original rounds. A congruity effect was found in both age…

Older adults tend to have lower emotion-perception accuracy compared to younger adults. Previous studies have centered on individual characteristics, including cognitive decline and positive attentional preferences, as possible mechanisms underlying these age differences in emotion perception; however, thus far, no perceiver-focused factor has…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

Early in life, infants possess an effective face-processing system which becomes specialized according to the faces present in the environment. Infants are also exposed to the voices and sounds of caregivers. Previous studies have found that face-voice associations become progressively more tuned to the types of association most prevalent in the…

The current study examined whether and how the presence of a positive or a negative emotional expression may affect the face recognition process at 3 months of age. Using a familiarization procedure, Experiment 1 demonstrated that positive (i.e., happiness), but not negative (i.e., fear and anger) facial expressions facilitate infants' ability to…