The ability to detect dangerous animals rapidly in complex landscapes has been historically important during human evolution. Previous research has shown that snake images are more readily detected than images of benign animals. To provide a stringent test of superior snake detection in preschool children and adults, Experiment 1 consisted of two…

The aim of the study was to undertake a behavioral investigation of the development of automatic orthographic processing during reading acquisition in French. Following Castles and colleagues' 2007 study ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97," 165-182) and their lexical tuning hypothesis framework, substituted-letter and…

This investigation examined short-term changes in child and adult cyclists' gap decisions and movement timing in response to general and specific road-crossing experiences. Children (10- and 12-year-olds) and adults rode a bicycle through a virtual environment with 12 intersections. Participants faced continuous cross traffic and waited for gaps…

Even when two-digit numbers are irrelevant to the task at hand, adults process them. Do children process numbers automatically, and if so, what kind of information is activated? In a novel dot-number Stroop task, children (Grades 1-5) and adults were shown two different two-digit numbers made up of dots. Participants were asked to select the…

Four experiments were conducted with 5- to 11-year-olds and adults to investigate whether facial identity, facial speech, emotional expression, and gaze direction are processed independently of or in interaction with one another. In a computer-based, speeded sorting task, participants sorted faces according to facial identity while disregarding…

Two experiments examined child and adult processing of hierarchical stimuli composed of geometric forms. Adults (ages 18-23 years) and children (ages 7-10 years) performed a forced-choice task gauging similarity between visual stimuli consisting of large geometric objects (global level) composed of small geometric objects (local level). The…

Performance of reaction time (RT) tasks was investigated in young children and adults to test the hypothesis that age-related differences in processing speed supersede a "global" mechanism and are a function of specific differences in task demands and processing requirements. The sample consisted of 54 4-year-olds, 53 5-year-olds, 59…

Results obtained from adults and 8-, 10-, 12- and 14-year-olds indicate that children's advantage for repeated stimuli in reaction-time tasks and the decrease in magnitude of the repetition effect as age increases can be attributed to repetition of the same stimulus, rather than repetition of the same response. (MP)

Massive practice on mental rotation of letters resulted in substantial change in speed of mental rotation of 11 and 20 year olds. Change in rate of mental rotation was characterized by hyperbolic and power functions. (RH)

Equally divided by sex and distributed equally across fourth/fifth, eighth/ninth, and college grade levels, 144 subjects performed a mental rotation task under instructions emphasizing either accuracy or speed of response, or both. Instructions had large and consistent effects on speed of response but were not as uniformly effective in their…

Children and adults learned associations between line length and color. Subjects were then presented with pairs of colors and asked to choose the color that had been associated with the longer line. For all ages, choice reaction times were related to differences in, and ratios of, line lengths. (BC)

Tested adults and children (age 6 to 16 years) on 4 speeded tasks that included 19 experimental conditions. The 6- to 16-year olds' response times decreased with age as a function of adults' response times. (MM)

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

Two studies involving children (mean age of 10 years) and adults investigated the effects of visual stimulus onsets and offsets on the latency of saccades to peripheral targets. Results were interpreted as indicating that, while stimulus intake processes have a greater interference effect on children's eye movements, oculomotor processes are…

To explore possible age differences, the first experiment assessed speed and maintenance of alertness in 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults. The second study tested the hypothesis that developmental variation in processing speed observed in some studies was attributable in part to age differences in alerting processes. (MP)