Perception is not an independent, in-the-moment event. Instead, perceiving involves integrating prior expectations with current observations. How does this ability develop from infancy through adulthood? We examined how prior visual experience shapes visual perception in infants, children, and adults. Using an identical task across age groups, we…

We extend decades of research on infants' visual processing by examining their eye gaze during viewing of natural scenes. We examined the eye movements of a racially diverse group of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 54; 27 boys; 24 infants were White and not Hispanic, 30 infants were African American, Asian American, mixed race and/or Hispanic) as…

Recent work asked if visual cues facilitate word segmentation in adults and infants (Thiessen, 2010). While adults showed better word segmentation when presented with a regular visual cue (consistent mapping between words and objects), infants did not. This difference was attributed to infants' lack of understanding that objects have labels.…

A series of experiments indicated that by 1 year of age, infants' perceptual categories correspond to linguistically significant categories. Developmental change between 6 and 12 months shows that perceptual abilities of the 1-year-old are not arbitrary, do not reflect all the discriminatory capabilities of the infant, and are similar to phonemic…

Relations among age appearance, facial attractiveness, and adult expectations of infants' developmental maturity were examined in three studies. Adults judged unattractive infants to be older and capable of more specific developmental skills than attractive infants but rated their general competence to be lower. (BC)

The articles in this collection consider one very interesting puzzle of development: U-shaped developmental functions. At some point during development, an organism might exhibit what seems like a regression from its expected developmental trajectory and, according to continuity models of development, this is aberrant. In this special issue,…

This paper will present evidence to support ontogenetic and phylogenetic parallels and draw from these comparisons to further illuminate our understanding of micro and macro human development. Individual and collective stages of physical, psychological and spiritual development will be compared and their homologous structures examined.…

Research programs of the human learning and behavior branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD) are described in five sections of this document. The specific programs conducted in the areas of learning and cognitive development, development of communicative abilities, biological bases of behavioral development,…

Noting that beyond the individual variations among humans, there is a body of mental abilities common to every human being, this book examines the debate among researchers about the extent to which humans are "preprogrammed," and suggests a new scientific psychology of human development. By examining experimental data obtained from…