This study examined whether children with mathematical difficulties (MDs) or comorbid mathematical and reading difficulties have a working memory deficit and whether the hypothesized working memory deficit includes the whole working memory system or only specific components. In the study, 31 10-year-olds with MDs and 37 10-year-olds with both…

Compared with object word learning, young children typically find learning color terms to be a difficult linguistic task. In this reflections article, I consider two questions that are fundamental to investigations into the developmental acquisition of color terms. First, I consider what constrains color term acquisition and how stable these…

Using the Luck and Vogel change detection paradigm, we sought to investigate the capacity of visual working memory in 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds. We found that performance on the task improved significantly with age and also obtained evidence that the capacity of visual working memory approximately doubles between 5 and 10 years of age, where it…

Reports on three experiments involving 300 six-year old children that investigated the conditions under which young children would produce "separates" as opposed to partial occlusion drawings. (HOD)

Eight-year-old children were trained on length or weight relationships between adjacent members of a five-item series of colored objects. Visual feedback was provided. Results indicated more salient visual feedback reduced learning effort for length but not for weight comparisons. Encoding differences found in another experiment were used to…

Among 294 children of three to eight years, tactual oddity learning increased gradually with age. The finding of bidirectional cross-modal transfer of oddity learning supported the suggestion that such transfer occurs when training and transfer oddity tasks share a common vehicle dimension. Results are considered consistent with the view that…

Studied spatial knowledge in fully blind versus fully sighted four- to nine-year olds. Found that blind children performed as well as sighted on all tasks but one. (ETB)

Three experiments are described which relate to models of infant visual preferences and to the ways in which preferences can be modified or created by habituation. Results suggest that the Banks and Salapatek's contrast sensitivity model can be a powerful predictor of preferential looking in newborns and that preferences based on experience can be…

Examined possibility that arousability as manifested in sensitization contributes to individual differences in infants' attentional profiles. Sensitization tended to occur more frequently with more complex than with less complex checkerboards. Infants showing sensitization looked longer and did not habituate as readily as infants who showed no…

Examines the relationship between visual attentiveness, search behavior, and duration of independent mobility for 56 eight-to ten-month-old infants when presented with three versions of the Piagetian Stage IV object permanence task. (HOD)

The relation between perceptual organization and categorization processes in 3- and 4-month-olds was explored. The question was whether an invariant part abstracted during category learning could interfere with Gestalt organizational processes. A 2003 study by Quinn and Schyns had reported that an initial category familiarization experience in…

Subjects from kindergarten-age to adult participated in four experiments. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in three experiments activated lights in viewing boxes; in the fourth experiment, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Results supported the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive…

Tests infants' dual-process performance (a process mediating response decrements called habituation and a state-dependent process mediating response increments called sensitization) on visual habituation-dishabituation tasks. (HOD)

Four experiments investigated newborns' ability to discriminate, recognize, and learn visual information embedded in the schematic face-like patterns preferred at birth. Results indicated that newborns discriminated face-like stimuli relying on their internal features and recognized a perceptual invariance between face-like configurations in…

The false recognition procedure was used to determine the relative dominance of visual and verbal memory organization at two grade levels. The results indicated that visual encoding was predominant for first graders, but that both visual and verbal encoding occurred with fourth graders. (MS)