Recent evidence in adults indicates that object perceptual processing is affected by the competition between action representations. In the absence of a specific motor plan, reachable objects associated with distinct structural (grasping) and functional (using) actions (e.g., calculator) elicit slower judgments than objects associated with similar…

Three experiments investigated 14-, 18-, and 24- month-old infants' understanding of visual perception. Infants viewed films in which a protagonist was either able to view the location of a hidden object (Visual Access condition) or was blindfolded when the object location was revealed (No Visual Access condition). When requested to find the…

U-shaped developmental functions, and their N-shaped cousins, have intrigued developmental psychologists for decades because they provide a compelling demonstration that development does not always entail a monotonic increase across age in a single underlying ability. Instead, the causes of development are much more complex. Indeed,…

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative…

The articles in this collection consider one very interesting puzzle of development: U-shaped developmental functions. At some point during development, an organism might exhibit what seems like a regression from its expected developmental trajectory and, according to continuity models of development, this is aberrant. In this special issue,…

Interest in U-shaped development has itself undergone a U-shaped progression. Twenty-five years ago, interest in U-shaped development was high. This interest was evident at a 1978 conference in Tel Aviv on "U-shaped Behavioral Growth" that resulted in the publication of a book of the same title 4 years later (Strauss, 1982). The breadth…

It has been 20 years since Bever's (1982) and Strauss and Stavy's (1982) books on U-shaped functions in human development were published. The three target articles in this issue describe several old and new U-shaped functions and new theoretical explanations for their existence. In this article, the authors will comment on two aspects of U-shaped…