We examined the ability of young infants (3- and 4-month-olds) to detect faces in the two-tone images often referred to as Mooney faces. In Experiment 1, this performance was examined in conditions of high and low visibility of local features and with either the presence or absence of the outer head contour. We found that regardless of the…

We investigated oculomotor anticipations in 4-month-old infants as they viewed center-occluded object trajectories. In two experiments, we examined performance in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) dynamic occlusion displays and in an additional 3D condition with a smiley face as the moving target stimulus. Rates of anticipatory eye…

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants' visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate…

In this study, 6-month-olds' perception of an object-related human grasping action was compared with their level of grasping performance using a within-participants design. In the action perception task, infants were presented with the video of an actor's grasping movement toward an occluded target object. Subsequently, an expected and an…

We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7-13 years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or…

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds'…

The psycholinguistic status of lexical tones and phones is indexed via phonological and tonological awareness (PA and TA, respectively) using Thai speech. In Experiment 1 (Thai participants, alphabetic script and orthographically explicit phones/tones), PA was better than TA in children and primary school-educated adults, and TA improved to PA…

Early in development, there is a transition in spatial working memory (SWM). When remembering a location in a homogeneous space (e.g., in a sandbox), young children are biased toward the midline symmetry axis of the space. Over development, a transition occurs that leads to older children being biased away from midline. The dynamic field theory…

Examined whether experience correctly producing consonants plays role in developing underlying representation which mediates perception of visible speech. Tested preschoolers (divided by their making of substitution errors) and adults in auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual conditions. Found children overall showed less visual influence and…

Tested whether a verbal description given before or after presentation of a picture effected visual processing and/or memory. (SB)

Finds that seven-month-old infants are sensitive to pictorial interposition whereas five-month-old infants are not. Suggests that sensitivity to pictorial depth information first appears between five and seven months of age. (Author)

Five experiments were conducted in order to determine what effect independent movement of an internal element has on the externality effect in young infants, and to consider the value of contrasting explanations of the effect itself. Subjects were 90 infants ranging in age from 28 to 49 days. (MP)

Study examines the role of figural characteristics in the development of pictorial inferences. Results indicate that although the pictorial inferences drawn by kindergarteners are heavily influenced by figural representations, such figural dependency cannot account for all of the observed developmental differences. (Author/RWB)

Four experiments assessed converging aspects of four-month-old infants' perceptions of visual patterns. Results together corroborate and extend previous findings that vertical symmetry has a special status in early perceptual development and that infants can perceive pattern wholes. (Author/AS)

Results from three studies involving college, third grade, and kindergarten subjects, suggest that individuals across a wide age range are able to use the visual properties of a stimulus for only a very brief period as the basis for making matched judgments. (Author/SDH)