Studied 2 1/2- to 6-year-old children's judgments of age category and relative age of stimulus faces, using a paired-comparison task. Faces showed variations in craniofacial profile shape, frontal face feature vertical placement, and facial wrinkling. (Author/NH)

Four experiments utilizing the familiarization-novelty preference procedure examined whether 3- and 4-month-olds could form categorical representations for cats versus dogs from the perceptual information available in silhouettes. Findings indicated that general shape or external contour information centered about the head was sufficient for…

Human infants' discrimination of changes in internal and external elements of compound visual patterns was investigated in four experiments employing a familiarization-novelty paradigm in which visual reinforcing patterns were presented contingent upon rate of high-amplitude nonnutritive sucking. (Author/JH)

Three studies looked at kindergarten, third and sixth grade students' and adults' comprehension of different types of adaptation or contrast effects for weight and temperature. Results showed improvement up to college age and revealed the importance of using older children in studies of developing theories of the mind. (SAK)

Compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of other perceptual object attributes in 2- to 5-year-olds as a function of language age. Found that although color was perceptually salient relative to other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition was found relative to motion, form, and size.…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Five developmental experiments examine the role of context in visual search. (Author/JH)

Three experiments investigated whether 4-month-olds would attend to and utilize the global configuration ("good form") of a partly occluded, moving object to perceive its unit and coherence behind the occluder. Results indicated that curvature per se provided information in support of completion, in addition to global configuration and…

The effects of perceptual and cognitive factors on information processing in visual periphery were studied in 5- and 8-year-old children and in adults. Subjects judged either the similarity (Study 1) or identity (Study 2) of geometric forms. (Author/SB)

This experiment was designed to determine whether children's inability to discriminate mirror-image oblique lines is a function of encoding in memory the left-right orientation or the degree of slope of an oblique line. (Author/SB)

A total of 180 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children participated in tasks employing an object array in which the views from the experimental positions were objectively of equal difficulty. (SB)

Reinterprets Jeannie R. Aschkenasy and Richard D. Odom's findings (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology; v34 n3 Dec 1982) on perceptual and cognitive development. The increasing dimensionalization of stimulus relations rather than the increasing detectability or influence of stimulus differences is argued. (BJD)

Data gathered on 92 girls (6-10 years of age) tested on Piagetian conservation tasks supports a theory of perceptual activity leading to decentration and indicates a change in viewing strategy associated with change in conservation status. (WY)

Investigates effects of perceptual salience and specific orientation values on 16 kindergarten and fourth-grade children executing a speeded sorting task. Kindergarten results supported the cognitive processing prediction that orientation sorting times would vary as a function of condition, but no differences were obtained for the fourth-grade…

Two experiments examined the effects of a culture-general factor, pattern redundancy, on the discrimination of five-tone melodies that differed in their adherence to Western tonal conventions, among 9-month olds, 5-year olds, and adults. Increasing exposure seemed to attenuate the effects of the pattern redundancy while amplifying the influence of…