Object construction involves organizing multiple objects into a unified structure (e.g., stacking blocks into a tower) and may provide infants with unique spatial information. Because object construction entails placing objects in spatial locations relative to one another, infants can acquire information about spatial relations during construction…

The study of development vacillates between a focus on change (i.e., studying how and why infants are so different from adults) and excitement about early competence and continuity (i.e., studying how capable infants are, and marveling at how similar they turn out to be to adults). The study of memory development has been no exception. This…

Allocentric spatial memory, the memory for locations coded in relation to objects comprising our environment, is a fundamental component of episodic memory and is dependent on the integrity of the hippocampal formation in adulthood. Previous research from different laboratories reported that basic allocentric spatial memory abilities are reliably…

Although human infants demonstrate early competence to retain visual information, memory capacities during infancy remain largely undocumented. In three experiments, we used a Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task to examine abilities to encode identity (Experiment 1) and spatial properties (Experiments 2a and 2b) of unfamiliar complex visual…

Two hundred and twenty two children (104 females), 1-8 years of age and young adults, were tested for up to 25 days on five versions of a non-verbal, non-navigational landmark task that had previously been used for monkeys. In monkeys, performance on this task is severely impaired following damage to the parietal cortex. For the basic task, the…

Theory suggests that the vision-for-perception and vision-for-action processing streams operate under very different temporal constraints (Glover, 2004; Goodale, Jackobson, & Keillor, 1994; Graham, Bradshaw, & Davis, 1998; Hu, Eagleson, & Goodale, 1999). With the present study, children and young adults were asked to estimate how far a cued target…

Bengali, English, and Hindi-speaking children five to nine years old were asked to place an object in front of or behind objects with or without obvious fronts. All children responded on the basis of an inherent object cue when a fronted object was used. When a nonfronted object was used, all children treated it as a fronted object. (Author/MP)

Two studies investigated the effect of age on memory for visual and spatial information. Five to 10 year olds were asked to reconstruct a previously seen spatial arrangement of objects. The association between an object's identity and its location was weaker for younger than for older children. (LB)

Children and adults were asked to place something "in front of" or "behind" a featured or nonfeatured object. Most subjects responded to the object's inherent features. A significant number of adults used the observer orientation cue. Children had more difficulty with the nonfeatured object but also used the observer…

From a developmental point of view, examines whether children and adults confuse time and distance when they traverse a specified distance in a particular period of time. (RH)

Four groups of children (N=80; C.A. 6.6. to 12.5; M.A. 7.9 to 14.7) were tested for ability to reproduce five-element two- and three-dimensional patterns. Significant interaction and main effects were found. Three-dimensional pattern performance increased with age; all ages performed well on two-dimensional patterns. (Author/DB)

Two experiments examined the development of children's memory for spatial location or color. Results refuted the proposal that in contrast to color, spatial location would not show developmental improvement because it is remembered automatically. Suggests that, for the age range studied, there was developmental change in the efficiency of…