Two studies are reported comparing the performance of monolingual and bilingual children on tasks requiring different levels of working memory. In the first study, 56 5-year-olds performed a Simon-type task that manipulated working memory demands by comparing conditions based on two rules and four rules and manipulated conflict resolution demands…

In adults, a salient tone embedded in a sequence of nonsalient tones improves detection of a synchronously and briefly presented visual target in a rapid, visually distracting sequence. This phenomenon indicates that perception from one sensory modality can be influenced by another one even when the latter modality provides no information about…

We investigated newborns' sensitivity to the direction of gaze of another's face by using a preferential looking technique. This study extends earlier work on a preference for faces with direct gaze in newborns. In Experiment 1, we replicate the basic finding of Farroni and colleagues that newborns prefer to look at faces with direct gaze. In…

Short-term changes in visual behavior observed in 80 infants (3-9 months) parallel changes observed across age by Piaget and fit well his assumption that the infant's increasingly sophisticated action patterns evolve by successive accomodations to encountered phenomenon. (WY)

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 investigated whether eye gaze cueing in 4-month-old infants is the result of a domain-specific module or reflects the activity of domain-general processes. In two of three experiments, infants perceived apparent motion of the pupils, and this directly elicited saccades, but only when this motion was preceded by a period of direct…

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.…

We studied how category typicality and out-of-category relatedness affect speeded category verification (vote ''yes'' if pictured object is clothing) in typically developing 4- to 14-year-olds and adults. Stimuli were typical and atypical category objects (e.g., pants, glove) and related and unrelated out-of-category objects (e.g., necklace,…

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)

Examined three possible explanations for findings that infants detect textural discrepancies based on individual features more readily than on feature conjunctions. Found that none of the proposed factors could explain 5.5-month-olds' superior processing of featural over conjunction-based textural discrepancies. Findings suggest that in infancy,…

A total of eighty 9-month-old infants were presented with a problem consisting of several different conditions which separated response, position on a table, and absolute spatial position as factors leading to errors in search for hidden objects. (MS)

Young children drew two opaque objects placed one behind the other. Over two-thirds of the children drew the objects separately in horizontal or vertical relationships. When drawing an object in a glass beaker, half of the children depicted the object vertically or horizontally separate from the beaker. (Author/DB)